1. Thunderbird mail box folder and profile resolver
Yeah, I know this is dumb, but so is Mozilla for not giving us an easy way to resolve multiple mail folders left over from one version to the next. I keep getting a deja vu sinking feeling about this problem. This week its an upstream thunderbird which installed itself and rolled my email back to 2009. Now I'm lost inside my home folder looking at four different .thunderbird folders each with its own story about the way the universe should work, and guess what, Back in Time has a bug, the result of failing to back up hidden .files in my home folder, so be warned, those snapshots you took of your family configuration holiday last summer, could turn out to be duds.
2. File Cleaner with Intelligent Heuristics
Keeping an Ubuntu system clean should not have to be guess work. Neither Kleanweep nor FSlint do it for me folks. (FSlint is a lot better than Kleansweep, I used it to remove my temp files)
While the two apps provide some functionality, they do not provide the kind of safety features one would expect from any programme which runs as root and which can seriously disrupt your home or business.
For example: where is information as to why an app "knows" a menu entry is dead or a thumbnail is obsolete, or such an such a directory is really "empty" based upon user experience? We shouldn't have to dig through manuals or decipher meaning of an entry merely because one file is equal to any other file in the eyes of the developers. Come on boys, give us some flashing lights like scrolling information on what the programme is doing so that users can decide for themselves once we arrive at that "heuristic" situation. A list of files that should or should not be deleted, do we have to deal with such a call? Best case scenario, based upon what we have learnt about your machine, this is what we can do, and here is how we plan on rolling back the changes. (Phew, glad I got that off my chest).
3. Alsa sound configuration wizard
Either we rip out Alsa or dump Pulsesaudio or live with the consequences. If we keep Alsa, then we have to keep the ability to configure the bloody thing, which means asound.conf and asoundrc. We can't simply lose the sound server and hope nobody notices while focusing on an increasingly elaborate gymnastics game that results in a portly Pulseaudo Server still with no Graphic Equaliser in the Official Ubuntu release despite it being released upstream!!!! Development of Maverick's "integrated" sound panel is all good and fine, but are we getting the basics right? I sense yet another widgets on left, not its on the right, yes its on the left debacle.
UPDATE: Solution to my sound issues was to upgrade ALSA. This posting explains some of the changes made in Lucid http://chrishatton.homeip.net/?p=118
4. PPA checker
This should be relatively easy to build. A simple script or add-on that checks ppa address and distribution is correct. If address is correct but distribution is wrong, for instance, it chooses the last known correct or up-to-date distribution. I found a lot of my ppas didn't make the upgrade to Lucid, yet the official Ubuntu upgrade utility simply swopped out the distribution for Lucid without bothering to check if Lucid versions were available. Most still run okay if I change the settings individually back to karmic. I even have a couple of jaunty ppas which provide hard to find software.
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