UI freeze exception

[Matthew East]

On 21 September 2011 09:34, Charline <Charline.poirier at canonical.com> wrote:
> On 20/09/11 22:04, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
>
> On 20 September 2011 08:56, Charline <Charline.poirier at canonical.com> wrote:
>
> We have filed a UI freeze exception to add system settings icon to the
> launcher [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ayatana-design/+bug/764744].  This
> bug is critical.  It would be much appreciated if you could add a
> comment acknowledging this bug so it can be fixed promptly.
>
> I disagree that the bug is critical. In fact, pitti and I already
> commented on the bug report that the proposed change would make things
> worse for netbook and even some laptop users by reducing the amount of
> space for running apps in the launcher by default.
>
> In usability testing this has been repeatedly an issue.  Participants failed
> any task that requires they use system settings. System settings is critical
> to users and critical to adoption. We should include by default in the
> launcher anything that is critical to usage. It would be a great improvement
> if we could fix this now.

The difference between you seems to come from a different definition
of "critical". The definition used in Ubuntu is quite woolly [1] "A
bug which has a severe impact on a large portion of Ubuntu users".
This is usually used for bugs which break a large number of Ubuntu
systems.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Importance

This bug has been open since 18 April 2011 and has been present in
Ubuntu 11.04 since its release. It can't possibly be the case that it
is so important that it wasn't fixed since April 2011 and suddenly
now, right at the end of the release when we are already in
documentation string freeze, it needs to be fixed. Anyway, there is
not much point the documentation team commenting on the bug in
circumstances where Martin Pitt, a member of the release team, has
already rejected the proposed change.

It was also a "Critical" bug that the settings item be added to the
session indicator menu [2]. I posted several comments on that bug
explaining why the settings icon should be in the launcher, and sabdfl
shot them down in March 2011. Then one month later it became critical
to do the opposite and yet it hasn't been done for 6 months?

[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ayatana-design/+bug/727823

As Jeremy has said, it could also be regarded as critical that users
be able to discover the system help, but a bug about that has been
ignored for months.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF