Comment 40 for bug 249373

On Tue, 2008-11-04 at 08:54 +0000, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> You can also note that the low priority focus for this bug upstream is
> due to the fact that the feature has never been working really correctly
> on many software and they don't consider that something stable and used
> by the majority of users,

Well, as the comments here show, some people were relying on this
feature. This should be out of discussion now.

> that might be wrong but should be discussed on
> bugzilla.gnome.org rather than here, intrepid ships now the current
> version which works mostly correctly and the way to go is to get the bug
> fixed now in the intrepid updates or jaunty

With all due respect, I'm really surprised with this answer. Does this
imply that every time an upstream project delivers a new version with
regressions, Ubuntu will ship it just because it is the new upstream
version, no matter what damage it may cause? Does it imply that if
Ubuntu, for whatever reason, ships upstream code with a regression,
Ubuntu users will be directed to complain upstream as their only
resource?

I don't think this reflects Ubuntu's objectives (but please correct me
if I'm wrong.) As far as I can tell, Ubuntu has generally done a very
good job of selecting appropriate versions of upstream software: stable
and functional enough for most people, yet current. And most users now
rely on upgrades not containing serious regressions. So it can be argued
that the Ubuntu Desktop Team made the wrong decision when they let this
software in, because in fact, the problem was very well known to them
(https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2008-September/026588.html look under "Release Status").

Now, my intention here is not to point fingers, but to ask for
reasonable damage control. As a minimum, I would expect this problem to
be acknowledged by the desktop team, and clearly reported in the Release
Notes, so that users can decide if they want to update. Of course, it
would also be good to try to fix gnome-session at least to the point of
not putting user data under risk (see my comment above in this bug
report) but I don't know if anyone can commit any resources to that.

Finally, regarding us complaining upstream, I'm not sure a lot of
disgruntled users commenting in GNOME Bugzilla will be of help. As far
as I can tell, this is not just a bug. What's going on here is that the
desired functionality is simply not implemented, or very immature in the
new gnome-session. So, it cannot be said that it "works mostly
correctly", because, in reality, it is able to start a session properly,
but far from being able to stop or restart it properly, which means it
currently does 30 to 50% of the intended functionality. This being the
actual state of affairs, I think we'll be very lucky if this is ready
for Jaunty.

Of course, GNOME should have also reported this clearly in their release
notes. They should also tell us what their policy regarding regressions
is, because they seem to be very picky regarding obscure ABI
regressions, but don't seem to mind large, user-visible regressions that
potentially put user data under risk of destruction. But this is
something we should try to bring to GNOME, and certainly not through
bugzilla.

Sorry for the long rant, but the way this problem has been
systematically understated worries me deeply, and detracts from the high
quality level we are already used to expect from Ubuntu.