On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 05:53:48PM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
The problem is it doesn't go far enough. It stops at "bad UI
== bad",
but that isn't always true. I think everyone advocating this change
agrees that it's bad UI. It's never been presented as anything but a
stopgap measure. But the issue is that, in this case, the bad UI
produces a better *product*, in terms of an actual desktop operating
system which we are releasing very shortly.
Does it? The desktop team would presumably assert that the cost of the
reduced user experience and increased user confusion is sufficient to
make the product *worse* than it would without shipping two mixers.
There's no absolute truth here, so the question isn't which option is
worse. The question is who we trust to make that decision.
This is clearly what our friends at Ubuntu think, given that quite
late
in their release cycle, they dropped the new gnome-volume-control in
favour of gst-mixer *by default* (a much more invasive change than is
being proposed here). They made this change on March 3rd, 2009, and have
since shipped with it. I haven't seen any complaints about it.
Having been a part of the Ubuntu decision making process, I think using
Ubuntu as any sort of comparison here weakens the argument. We're
talking about the distribution that shipped compiz by default 18 months
ago, desite it clearly being a regression in a huge number of different
ways.
Having said that, there are ways in which the Ubuntu decision is a
better one than ours. It's less flying-car future, but there's no
regression and no additional user confusion. I've personally got no
objection to FESCO overruling a decision on technical grounds and
forcing a reversion to the previous status quo (or whatever else is
available under the contingency plans), but the compromise we've ended
up with here looks awfully like a baby that's been cut in half.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59(a)srcf.ucam.org