blueman as default bluetooth client in Gnome

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, Aug 07, 2009 at 08:48:26AM -0700, ajmctaggart wrote:
> Hello Devs!

> I am so thankful for the amazing work you all do.  I am not a developer by
> any means, but more an end user concerned with usability.  It was suggested
> on the Ayatana mailing list that I pose my question and seek some help here.

> By default, Ubuntu used the gnome-bluetooth package.  Frankly, there is very
> little this package does well.  The GUI is poorly designed, and I think it's
> quite confusing, leaving me to do most configurations by the command line.

> I found that by using blueman instead, the usability of bluetooth on my
> desktop now rivals what I have see from Mac OS X.  A good GUI, lots of
> options, and a very fast client overall.

> What would I have to do to petition that blueman replace gnome-bluetooth
> going forward?

On the technical side, the dependencies of blueman would need to be cleaned
up before we could consider it by default:

The following NEW packages will be installed:
  blueman python-all python-all-dev python-dev python-pyrex python2.5-dev
  python2.6-dev
0 upgraded, 7 newly installed, 1 to remove and 23 not upgraded.
Need to get 7447kB of archives.
After this operation, 23.8MB of additional disk space will be used.

I don't know why it needs python-pyrex, but pulling python-all-dev into the
default install is a non-starter.

I agree that gnome-bluetooth's UI isn't very good; I have a laundry list of
bugs to file against it, now that it's taken bluez-gnome's place in the
default install...

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org