Bug#170037: This bug should be fixed!

[Martin Samuelsson]

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On Sat, Nov 20, 2004 at 08:14:04PM +0100, Lo=EFc Minier wrote:
>  Oh please!  I just spent some time reading these old reports:
>  - #278451 is closed with a good explanation you might have missed:
>    firefox switched to a full gtk2 integration, and yes this might have
>    impacted keybindings, but at least these are now coherent between
>    gtk2 apps.

I did read them and I read them well. So I did not miss such a trivial
thing.

No offense, but I think it is you who are missing the point.

What matters is the topic of #170037, that the default keybindings are
highly unexpected by at the very least as many users as there are bug
reports.

I am tempted to say most, but can settle for that very many users of
unix like systems expect their software to have emacs like key bindings
if nothing else is stated. Because that is the way things have been
for several decades and this also justifies to call these bindings
traditional unix key bindings.

With an increasing amount of debian users coming from other environments
the default keybindings of gtk2 are far from unnecessary, of course.
Since this new generation of users feel more comfortable with them and
are constantly confused by traditional unix key bindings.

Different users clearly have different needs and desires and the feature
of remapable key maps that gtk2 provides is heaps good! No question
about that!

However what was requested (and even offered to be done) by the original
bug reporter was that a debconf question should be asked upon gtk2 package
installation informing the user that gtk2 provides different key maps
and let the system administrator choose which one to have as a system
default.

Tagoh-san's reason for not doing this seemed to be that on multi user
systems existing application could have their key bindings remapped
after such a debconf selection.

I would say though that problem is only hypothetical. About 100% of the
debian systems out there are unaffected, i.e. single user systems with
gtk2 or multiuser systems without gtk2. For the probably less than 1% of
debian systems that are multi users systems with gtk2 I would say we
could guess their administators are competent enough not messing up and
answering debconf questions wrong. Don't you think?

Traditional unix key bindings were the default with gtk1 and there's no
other natural way to inform the user about key bindings than debconf so
I think that libgtk2 should start asking before sarge becomes
debian/stable.

Please reread #170037 with traditional unix users perspective in mind
and tell us after that if that doesn't change your mind.

Clearly *users perspective* are the key words here. A user can't care
less if a new version of gfoo fooes using gtk2 instead of gtk2.
Hopefully the new functionality matters to her, but forcing her to read
library documentation to use an applications is moving developers and
maintaners work to users.

Do you really think that I should reopen the firefox bug report and
start filing against all other packages that use gtk2? Isn't it better
to solve the problem at it's root? Regardless if the problem is an
actual bug or only an need for action to simplify for users?

Thank you,
--
/Martin

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