Comment 121 for bug 882274

@Danillo (and @all)

What I liked very much about your comment are two things:

Firstly:
>If there still is activity in a bug and there's even people forking Unity to fix it, then the bug's not just someone's pet peeve, it's a real problem for a lot of users. Otherwise, the "affects me too" is just pointless.

You really get to the heart of one of the problems. The "affects me too" system is absolutely without any meaning if the usual answer to 80, 200 or 250 "affect me voters" can simply be "there are millions of Ubuntu users so those few 'affects me too voters' do not count". If there are millions of Ubuntu users so be it, but if the "affects me too" votes have to climb a ladder of let's say 500,000 rungs (i.e. votes) to be considered worth discussion this is a really meaningless system. Perhaps one should create a bug report "the affects me too system is broken". But then again we would need some hundred-thousand affects me too voters.

Secondly:
> Now, I've always felt that Unity has always been several steps ahead of Gnome Shell both in usability as in customizability, but GS extensions make Unity fall behind. It's very important that a similar system for Unity like suggested be discussed instead of being so quickly dismissed. Firefox does have headaches with add-on support, but that payed off, making it a huge factor for it's dissemination. I can't live without some Firefox add-ons, and neither can Ubuntu: if we didn't have "Ubufox" and "Firefox Unity Integration", Firefox in Ubuntu wouldn't just lack overlay scrollbars, it would look like a complete alien. If Unity extensions had an extensive disclaimer about their lack of warranty and how that they break Unity's design and may possibly break other things in the system, they wouldn't need support from Canonical, would they? They don't even need to have Canonical involvement at all.

I now, this is a long excerpt of your comment, but I think it is worth reading again (by everybody). And I mean it: really everybody should read this because this is a very important and good statement. This is the reason why Unity should be extensible.

And btw.: when I referred to the new extension system of Gnome Shell and asked why we cannot have something like this for Unity, a simple answer by the developers would be "not now, but perhaps later. We lack manpower but see the necessity of such a system". But there was nothing like that. Now, we have a very good explanation by Danillo, why we need extensions. And I am thrilled to hear some answers about that.