Spatial mess prevention

[Jonas Jørgensen]

Pardon me for jumping into the discussion as an outsider with a bunch of 
quotes from official documents, but it seems to me that the way this 
change was made violates some of Ubuntu's policies and procedures:

1) According to the release schedule[1], Hoary is currently in Final 
Freeze, which is described[2] as an "EXTREMELY anal-retentive, 
high-caution period", where only critical bugs and exceptional 
circumstances patches can go in. This change hardly qualifies as one of 
those.

2) From the Ubuntu Code of Conduct[2]: "Be considerate. [...] For 
example, when we are in a feature freeze, please don't upload 
dramatically new versions of critical system software". We are in a 
feature freeze, and while this is not a dramatically new version, it is 
a highly significant change.

3) I understand that this change was made upon the sabdfl's request. The 
Governance document[3] describes the role of the sabdfl as one who makes 
the necessary difficult decisions when no consensus can be reached by 
the community; not as one who orders changes in UI behavior a week 
before release time without any public debate beforehand. The same 
document notes that "It is understood that the divisive use of the 
SABDFL's authority could weaken the project. For that reason the 
authority is used carefully". It appears that those lines were forgotten 
when this decision was made.

I join others in thread in asking the developers to consider reverting 
this change for now and deferring the decision to Breezy.

[1] http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/HoaryReleaseSchedule
[2] http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/FinalFreeze
[3] https://www.ubuntulinux.org/community/conduct/document_view
[4] https://www.ubuntulinux.org/community/processes/governance