One Hundred Paper Cuts Round 7 Progress Report

One Hundred Paper Cuts Round 7 drew to a close last week. Here are the paper cuts that were (or were not) addressed:

GNOME Panel icons (on right side) move apparently randomly on session start in some situations

Ryan Maki wrote a surprisingly small patch to fix this long-standing and very annoying bug with over forty duplicates. Upstream reviewed and tested the patch, and verified that it works and they seem to be pleased with it.

Edit: I’m told that Mark McLoughlin wrote this patch four years ago.

Dates are not consistently displayed according to locale

Evolution’s New Appointment dialog was fixed upstream and in Karmic!

Inconsistent spelling of “Filesystem” (vs. “File system”

Bryce Harrington submitted a patch, so you should see “File System” used consistently. “File System” and “Filesystem” are equally poor names, so we’re still looking to improve this situation.

Change “abort” to “close” or “cancel” in default KDE apps

Celeste Lyn Paul noticed this geekspeak, and Mackenzie Morgan made sure KDE users can dismiss their dialogs without the drama.

Notification popup should display filename in header and job number in details rather than the other way around

Tim Waugh and Till Kamppeter tackled this one, and it’s now fixed in Karmic — thanks, guys!

These paper cuts could use a brave soul to push them until they are fixed.

Can you write or test patches? Pick a bug that you care about, check on its status upstream, create a patch if you can, or look for someone who can help you create one. Follow up on it until it gains a patch and that patch is reviewed by someone with some authority on the matter. This is your chance to take some responsibility and gain first-hand perspective on how free software works.

Downloads should go to ~/Downloads

This should be fairly simple to fix, no code is needed and upstream behaves this way already.

“Home Folder” has 3 different names

The original suggestion was to name your home folder with your short username everywhere, but the discussion drags on. The bug is “In Progress” but it’s not clear what direction it’s heading in.

“Less than a minute remaining” text is confusing and unnecessary

In the middle of installation, the text “Less than a minute remaining” appears, at which point there is much more than a minute remaining. The bug has no clear owner.

“Eject” should eject the CD-ROM drive tray

Currently, attempting to eject an empty disk drive results in heinous errors. This was temporarily fixed, but reverted in Jaunty.

Drag and drop of Bookmarks from Places menu copies entire directory instead of creating a link

This is a fantastic paper cut, and is likely trivial to fix, it just needs an owner.

Background image geometry options are confusing

Daniel Fore’s proposal is to change (Tiled, Centered, Zoom, Scaled, Fill Screen) to (Tile, Center, Zoom, Scale, Stretch).

Now, on to Round 8!