Comment 42 for bug 742516

@iLugo
I cannot speak for Martin Pitt, nor for Canonical, but I believe I can explain why this bug is (and should be) of Medium rather than High importance.

Importance for bugs in Ubuntu is assigned according to the priority in the Ubuntu project as a whole, and the effect of the bugs on Ubuntu users generally. This bug affects only a minority of Ubuntu users using GIMP, and GIMP is itself not nearly as heavily used a package as many other packages. If you search Launchpad to see what bugs *are* marked High, you'll see that they tend to be much broader in scope or have much more serious and unmitigable effects. The more bugs are marked High, the less meaningful it is for a bug to be marked High. This bug simply does not warrant that label.

There is no parallel between GIMP in Ubuntu and Adobe Photoshop running on Windows and Mac OS X, and that topic is irrelevant to what this bug's importance should be. Those operating systems do not provide Photoshop (nor hardly any applications) as a component of the system, and they take no responsibility at all for whether or not Photoshop works. Photoshop could break for *all* users of Mac OS X or Windows and it is unlikely that Apple or Microsoft would be considered responsible in the slightest. Adobe is considered to be fully responsible for whether or not Photoshop works in any particular situation. However, if Microsoft or Apple provided support for Photoshop and it stopped working for a minority of users, and the OS vendor provided information about how to easily work around the problem, it seems unlikely that anyone would criticize the OS vendor for failing to prioritize fixing the problem. Actually, it seems unlikely that anyone would expect the OS vendor to make any effort at all to fix a problem with an easy workaround that affected so few users. (Fortunately, the standard to which Ubuntu's user community holds Canonical and the Ubuntu project is much higher than the standard to which most desktop OS vendors' customers hold them.)