Installing codecs exposes "bad" and "ugly" terminology

Googling for "codec good bad ugly" returned as its first result, http://thomas.apestaart.org/log/?p=537. This has a reply from the GStreamer release manager about the decision.

The first comment to this blog post suggests that it would have been clearer to use the names:

plugins-stable "good"
plugins-experimental "bad"
plugins-nonfree "ugly"

Personally I like Spaghetti Westerns, but I do think the "stable"/"experimental"/"nonfree" labels would be better here.

It's difficult to justify diverging from upstream here, but we should support changing the name upstream

Meanwhile, it should be possible to change the package descriptions (they should be more descriptive anyway), and show those exclusively (and not the package names) in the UI

Showing the description should be implemented in gnome-app-install.

What would you propose for the description? Would this solve this bug?
GStreamer plugins from the non-free ("ugly") set
GStreamer plugins from the unstable ("bad") set
GStreamer plugins from the stable ("good") set

Or would you remove ugly/bad/good entirely?

Triaged to Confirmed. I like spaghetti westerns as well, but to anyone who hasn't seen "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" staring Clint Eastwood, would be lost on what "ugly" means. At some point the names could be changed. It's up to the gstreamer developers or the Ubuntu packaging team to make less-offensive aliases.

TerryG wrote:
> Triaged to Confirmed. I like spaghetti westerns as well, but to anyone
> who hasn't seen "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" staring Clint
> Eastwood, would be lost on what "ugly" means. At some point the names
> could be changed. It's up to the gstreamer developers or the Ubuntu
> packaging team to make less-offensive aliases.

I agree with Matt that we shouldn't change the package name (specially if Debian
doesn't do so, but even if it was my decision to change it in Debian, I wouldn't
do it), but we can change the Description and make gnome-app-install show the
description.

Another thing would be for gstreamer's uptream to change the names, of course.

Emilio, someone who is (rightly) alarmed when we call software "bad" would be even more alarmed if we called it "unstable" AND "bad". So no, that wouldn't solve the problem, it would make it worse. :-)

Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Emilio, someone who is (rightly) alarmed when we call software "bad"
> would be even more alarmed if we called it "unstable" AND "bad". So no,
> that wouldn't solve the problem, it would make it worse. :-)

heh, right. Perhaps the same but removing bad/ugly/good. Although I doubt that
will be any better than it is now, as a user will be as (or more) alarmed if he
sees unstable (or experimental) than if he sees bad or ugly.

Non-free sounds like a good replacement for ugly. good doesn't need to be
replaced at all. But for bad... what about "not-so-good"? :)

I think "stable", "experimental", and "nonfree" (as suggested by Sean) would be fine, and those names should be used upstream. But as I said in the initial report, Ubuntu shouldn't be showing the "Apply the following changes?" window at all.

Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> I think "stable", "experimental", and "nonfree" (as suggested by Sean)
> would be fine, and those names should be used upstream.

Forward it to upstream them ;-)

> But as I said in
> the initial report, Ubuntu shouldn't be showing the "Apply the following
> changes?" window at all.
>

Agreed. And if that's fixed the gst-plugins-* could be closed as obsolete (it
would still be showed as bad/ugly in Synaptic, but if a user goes to synaptic
and installs the package by hand he likely knows what he's doing, that's
completely different than going to play music and seen that dialogue).

I would really like to avoid diverging from Debian now that we have the
gstreamer stack in sync.

 affects gnome-app-install
 status confirmed

What should gnome-app-install do about this? The description of the gst-plugins-bad0.10 is:
Description: GStreamer plugins from the "bad" set
 GStreamer is a streaming media framework, based on graphs of filters
...

So the short description has the word "bad" in it pretty prominently. I would suggest to remove this from the short description. There is nothing in g-a-i or the app-install-data package that would show "bad" otherwise.

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 09:32:01AM -0000, Michael Vogt wrote:
> What should gnome-app-install do about this? The description of the gst-plugins-bad0.10 is:
> Description: GStreamer plugins from the "bad" set
> GStreamer is a streaming media framework, based on graphs of filters
> ...
>
> So the short description has the word "bad" in it pretty prominently. I
> would suggest to remove this from the short description. There is
> nothing in g-a-i or the app-install-data package that would show "bad"
> otherwise.

Is the best way to fix this to change the gstreamer packages, or can they be
overridden in g-a-i to provide proper descriptions?

How about these:

Description: Multimedia plugins for GStreamer (stable)
Description: Multimedia plugins for GStreamer (experimental)
Description: Multimedia plugins for GStreamer (restricted)

--
 - mdz

Again, what gnome-app-install should do is described in the initial report: "Since I've already clicked the 'Install' button, don't show the 'Apply the following changes?' window at all."

I have marked this as affecting gst-plugins-{bad,good,ugly}{,-multiverse}0.10 as a means of suggesting that the short package descriptions for these packages should be changed in accordance with Matt Zimmerman's suggestion in comment #12. Regardless of whether the removal of the "Apply these changes?" dialog gets implemented, having less oblique short descriptions for these packages would be a welcome improvement, and is by and large independent of how upstream looks at this issue, as far as I can tell.

This package has been removed from Ubuntu. Closing all related bugs.