14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu 12.10 will face some tough criticism if the problems with Unity lenses are not resolved before launch. A developer from Canonical wants to implement a solution that should allow users to disable the lens network access.
Didier Roche, developer at Canonical, has posted in his Google+ profile a possible solution to the current problems Ubuntu 12.10 is facing, and implicitly Canonical.
He explains that it's not that simple to just implement an on/off button because a lot of subsystems are involved in Unity.
He added a bug on Launchpad explaining that he will try to add an option either in the appearance or in privacy gnome-control-center panel.
Through this option users will be able to disable shopping lens suggestions in the Home dash, Ubuntu One music store results in the music lens, and Ubuntu One results in the video lens.
Keep in mind that Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) has entered feature freeze and new features are not being added to the distribution, unless there's a good reason for it.
Iain Lane, Ubuntu core developer and Debian developer, also posted a response on Launchpad, stating that, from a feature freeze point of view it is not a problem, as long as it is tested by some people to do what is expected of it (stage in a PPA once merged upstream for testing).
One of the major problems that arise when developers try to implement new options beyond features freeze is that the translation teams have to go back and work on areas that were finished. Iain Lane asked Didier Roche to re-use strings, if possible, that were already translated.
Canonical is doing everything in order to try and limit the problems they've created themselves. It's not unusual for users to find major problems after an operating system is launched, but it's quite rare to see the Linux community in uproar before an official launch.