Re: GNOME Online Accounts extensibility

[Ken VanDine <kvandine gnome org>]

Sorry, not trying to sound harsh here but I couldn't find a better way
to say this.  

Basically you are saying that GOA isn't really an open technology to
help consolidate user's online accounts, it is only to help consolidate
accounts for blessed GNOME apps?  This doesn't really help users in the
big picture, but I guess the design team makes those decisions.

Does this mean third party developers shouldn't try to leverage GNOME as
a platform anymore?  Maybe that is a topic for another thread, as much
as I love GNOME, it is becoming harder and harder to develop for.  I
miss the days when GNOME was a platform, I hope there is a way we can
change that and turn it into a platform again!

--Ken

On Thu, 2011-10-06 at 13:40 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Ken VanDine <kvandine gnome org> wrote:
> > I really want to get rid of gwibber-accounts for configuring accounts in
> > Gwibber.  It makes sense to use GOA for this,
> 
> I don't think it necessarily does, no. See below.
> 
> > however gwibber supports
> > quite a few social networks as well as supporting third party service
> > plugins.  So anyone can add support for a new social network without
> > changing gwibber.  So to transition to using GOA, we would need to
> > include support for all the social networks Gwibber supports out of the
> > box, and provide a way for third party developers to include the
> > necessary provider for GOA.
> >
> > This really won't be manageable if all the providers need to be merged
> > upstream with GOA and included in a release.
> >
> > Thoughts?
> 
> Well, until we've figured out a story in GNOME for how "social
> networks" are integrated, it just doesn't make sense to add this to
> GOA. The more general observation (of which the above is a
> specialization of) is that we do not add support for providers P (e.g.
> Google, Facebook) or services S (e.g. Documents, Mail, Chat, Calendar,
> Contacts) until
> 
>  1. we know how it's going to be used in a GNOME release; and
> 
>  2. there is something in the GNOME release using it.
> 
> Basically: you need to work with the GNOME Designers on figuring out
> how "social networks" fit in.
> 
> For GNOME 3.2 we have the following users:
> 
>  - Empathy / GNOME Shell (Chat)
>  - Evolution (Mail, Calendar)
>  - GNOME Contacts (Contacts)
>  - GNOME Documents (Documents)
> 
> and we still only support Google as a provider. Why? Because Google is
> right now the only provider where
> 
>  a) we can use anonymous API keys; and
> 
>  b) we have support for Google in the above-mentioned apps
> 
> The other problem is how to handle API keys. As I have mentioned
> before on this list and elsewhere, a couple of months ago I sent a
> long mail with legal questions to the GNOME Foundation and I'm still
> waiting on a response. Basically, we want to be able to legally ship
> API keys along with GOA. So it boils down to this: even if we had all
> the protocol support for, say, Facebook in, say, GNOME Contacts
> (through libfolks) and Empathy (through Telepathy) we would not be
> able to turn it on because of unresolved API key and legal questions.
> 
> > Are there plans for making service providers in GOA pluggable?
> 
> Not at this point, no, and probably not in the future either. Why? Two reasons
> 
> I.  Adding support for a provider P, currently means making code-changes to
>     all of the GNOME apps using its services.. because most of the time standard
>     standardized protocols are not in use. For the few cases where it
> uses a standard
>     protocol (such as XMPP and IMAP/SMTP) we could support pluggable providers.
> 
>     For example, we could, presumably, read "plug-in" files from some directory
>     so we could list 200 different XMPP chat services or 200 different
> IMAP servers.
>     That that no-one ever heard about. But would we want the user to
> see this? The
>     answer is: not in GOA. But see II. below
> 
> II. To avoid user confusion we only want the major online services in GOA.
>     Support for more specialized protocols/services should happen in each
>     separate app - that's why, for example, that Empathy still has a preferences
>     menu so you can add support for e.g. ICQ, Zephyr and other fringe chat
>     services and protocols. And that's also why you still have support in
>     Evolution for manually adding IMAP/SMTP servers.
> 
> I will try and add some of these guidelines (or "rules" if you want)
> to the GOA documentation, see
> 
>  http://developer.gnome.org/goa/unstable/
> 
> for what it looks like right now.
> 
>     David