Comments on: second worst dialog I saw during a recent Ubuntu upgrade

By: Jason D. Clinton - PackageKit and apt incompatible

Jason D. Clinton - PackageKit and apt incompatible — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:23:15 +0000

[...] thing is, people designing for more than just UNIX experts thinks that displaying stuff like thishttp://tieguy.org/blog/2008/04/11/second-worst-dialog-i-saw-during-a-recent-ubuntu-upgrade/http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2008/04/upgrading_to_hardy.htmlis a big mistake. Not [...]

By: Brett Smith

Brett Smith — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 13:02:04 +0000

My personal favorite comes from kernel upgrades. (Sorry for the horrible image hosting; my web server is being moved across the country right now. For future reference, in case ImageShack takes it down, it’s usually here.)

The reason it’s popping up this dialog is that it’s afraid my GRUB configuration isn’t prepared to handle an initrd, as it will so helpfully inform you if you click the “Help” button. In fact, my GRUB configuration *is* prepared to handle that; I’m not sure why debconf hasn’t caught on. I’m ashamed to admit it never occurred to me to report this as a bug…

By: DeeJay1

DeeJay1 — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 07:52:34 +0000

Add a third dialog to it - I’ve just seen orca open a terminal after logging into my Hardy, asking me about various settings…

By: James Henstridge

James Henstridge — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 04:43:45 +0000

James: your characterisation of the Abiword situation is a bit off. Without any input from the Abiword developers, the latest release as of the Ubuntu beta release would have been included.

The Abiword developers wanted a new major version in the release instead (a major version that they only decided to make after Ubuntu’s feature freeze: not the sort of thing that could be planned for). Having them take responsibility for some of the QA was an option that gave them what they wanted. It also appears to be the reason Fedora picked up the new release at such a late stage in its release schedule too.

By: GNOME People | FootNotes

GNOME People | FootNotes — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:39:14 +0000

[...] This blog post was brought to you by the huge time required to link WebKit (I want gold as the default linker!) Source: PlanetGNOME Categories: GNOME People 10:00 Luis Villa: second worst dialog I saw during a recent Ubuntu upgrade [...]

By: James

James — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:54:59 +0000

That looks like a debconf note, and like the problems Gerv lists (conffile handling) show Ubuntu is a just thin wrapper around Debian, maintained by an organisation that doesn’t have enough manpower to create a coherent distribution. See also the cargo-culted stable update procedures that push the work of integrating stable versions and bugfixes onto the upstream developer (eg Abiword) instead of doing what a real distro does and managing it themselves.