synaptic on 17.10

[Liam Proven]

On 2 February 2018 at 12:27, Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> Michael is saying that he doesn't have time for it right now, but is
> happy to mentor somebody else doing the work.  That's a pretty common
> response to things you accept are bugs but that will take more time than
> you have available at the moment.
>
> Perhaps it's just my idiolect, but your paraphrasing sounded much more
> like "it's too much work [so I'm ruling it out of scope for this
> project]".

I did not mean to imply the part you put in square brackets, no.

> You seem pretty determined to put an "all Wayland's fault"
> interpretation on this, but this is a very different tone from the one
> that the maintainer actually took on the bug report.  Michael isn't
> saying "why should I do this?" (and I don't think he needs people to say
> that for him), but rather "sorry, I have too much else on my plate right
> now".  Readers can judge for themselves, I suppose.
[...]

I am sure it's not the first time that a change in something else has
highlighted a problem that's been around for years but nobody's
bothered to address.

For instance, in an only broadly analogous way, the introduction of
UAC on Windows Vista broke a lot of Windows apps whose programmers
just assumed they'd always be running as root.

It's more or less fixed _now_ and was by some time before Windows 7
was superceded, but it caused a lot of hassle.

So did Ubuntu's switch to no-accessible-root-account + sudo back in 2004 or so.

I'm not saying it's Wayland's _fault_ or anything wrong with it. Maybe
it's even a good idea. But yes, Wayland caused this.

And I'm not 100% convinced Wayland is a good idea, TBH. Everyone is
accepting it, but for me it is associated with things like PulseAudio,
GNOME 3 and worst of all systemd -- all stuff that mostly hasn't
personally bothered me significantly, and I can either work around or
ignore, but which a lot of smart people whose opinions I trust don't
like.

Ubuntu going it alone with Mir was a bad plan -- it's too big of a job.

However, there are multiple Red Hat-led initiatives which basically
won't accept any significant contributions from outside and will not
listen when told that what they are doing are bad ideas. But because
RH remains the 800lb gorilla in FOSS, we get them anyway.

GNOME 3 won't accept outside input; their rebuffs of Canonical are
well-documented, but the GNOME community will not accept they did
anything wrong. I have attempted to engage with them personally -- the
GNOME Foundation sent me to GUADEC 2016 -- and it didn't work. I get
soundbites that don't say anything meaningful to me. It's very
frustrating.

The systemd project is much the same, as was Pulseaudio. For me,
Pulseaudio was like CUPS -- it solved a problem and for me it Just
Worked™.

Systemd, less so. It stops my systems booting on a regular basis.
That's a problem. They're just personal laptops but that is more than
enough.

GNOME 3 I find unusable.

So although I personally have no issues with Wayland, I am a little
dubious about it because it comes from that camp.

For instance, in Ubuntu there was a well-documented flaw I personally
reproduced. Wayland didn't notice if you switched vconsole. So if I
opened a text editor, hit Ctrl-Alt-F2 (say) to switch to a vconsole,
logged in, then switched back to the graphical desktop, there was my
login and password in the text editor, readable by anyone.

Not an exploit -- a major design flaw. Fixed now but shows lack of
thought and planning, which leads to the question what else did they
not think about?


-- 
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