Two weeks ago I posted this call to remove ccsm from the Ubuntu repositories. Three things precipitated this posting.
- I was sick of a tool that said it did one thing but didn’t really do that being shipped in Ubuntu.
- Alex Chiang’s plea for us to be smarter about how we educate users.
- I love to get flamed by 1990’s Linux users.
My proposal was picked up by some sites and some drama ensued. The discussion on -desktop was quite useful to me, I had no idea that ccsm was so crucial to our a11y story, and as Chris Coulson points out it’s really quite embarrassing that we don’t have this in our a11y tools to begin with. Unfortunately many people thought I was being anti-power user, which is not the case, I like it when I have the ability to modify stuff, but it would suck if by customizing your desktop we irrevocably crash a user’s desktop. That’s not choice, that’s just being mean!
I’d like to highlight the work of two people in particular who worked this problem. The first was Alan Bell, who not only pointed out some of the a11y problems that ccsm solved, but submitted a fix almost right after my posting fixing the scrollbar/slider behavior.
This was followed by two fixes by Andrew Starr-Bochicchio. One to add a warning, and another (which I think is more crucial) is to make it so you can’t accidentally uncheck the “crash my desktop” checkbox, which for some reason exists.
Thanks to Didier Roche for being responsive to these fixes and shipping them in 12.04. As someone who supports end users, I salute the work all three of you have put into making this suck less.
I admit I had an alterior motive. I knew that by proposing the removal of this tool that I would stir a pot, and I knew if people actually cared about it someone would fix it. I even dared Alex and Didier: “No one has maintained this tool for years, if people really cared about it, someone would fix it, since no one has fixed it, no one cares, so let’s just remove it.” But alas I was wrong, out of 487 comments on OMG Ubuntu and the replies on the mailing list and a bunch of “holier than thou” comments; two people had to ruin my plan.
I still think the tool should be removed, but hey, the decision was never mine to make. Two people have stepped up to the plate to make it suck less, which is a much larger number than 0. And that’s good enough for me.
Since this turned out decently enough for my next trick I plan to complain about gnome-settings-daemon. That’s the thing that when it doesn’t work it makes your desktop look like Windows 95. Awesome.
Nota Bene: The discussion outside the mailing list was unfortunately not as polite. I originally felt like posting some of the mean, inappropriate things I’ve received in emails and other media as an example on how horrible people can be, but in the end I think it’s important to not let people like this hijack our community. If you don’t like that I post things to fight for users then you’re just going to have to deal with it.