Code review comment for lp:~albertomilone/gnome-control-center/randr-virtual

On Thursday 29 January 2009 17:48:37 Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> Alberto Milone wrote:
> > Alberto Milone has proposed merging
> > lp:~albertomilone/gnome-control-center/randr-virtual into
> > lp:~ubuntu-core-dev/gnome-control-center/ubuntu.
> >
> > Requested reviews:
> > VCS imports (vcs-imports)
> >
> > With xserver 1.6, the ctrl-alt-backspace shortcut for killing X has been
> > defaulted to off.
> >
> > At UDS it was decided for Ubuntu to accept this upstream change, but to
> > provide GUI mechanisms for GNOME allowing the user to switch it on or
> > off.
> >
> > This branch implements this mechanism.
>
> I very much appreciate Alberto's work in implementing this, but would
> like to test the decision against our commitment to ease of use. I think
> enabling or disabling this feature in X is an expert option. I think we
> can choose to enable it, or disable it, and of course we can allow
> experts to change that through a config file or through a rebuild, but
> this capability *should not* be exposed to end-users as a GUI option. It
> will create more confusion than it will solve.
>
> Mark

Dear Mark,

I see your concern but the option which my patch adds is very simple, see the
following screenshot:
http://albertomilone.com/ubuntu/gnome/gnome3.png

It says "Ctrl+Alt+Backspace restarts the xserver" and doesn't even mention the
word "DontZap".

A lot of users (see what's happening on ubuntuforums.org) will upgrade to
Jaunty and will be a bit shocked by this change. Most of them have learnt to
deal with X freezes (which are by no means infrequent) by using
Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. This doesn't make them "experts" though and it's very
likely that they are not aware of the existence of the DontZap option.

For this reason (as requested at the UDS) I implemented the same change in
Kubuntu:
http://albertomilone.com/wordpress/?p=312

I deem it a good compromise.

What do you think?

Alberto