Documents and core apps

[mcatanzaro gnome org]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2019 at 9:25 AM, Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> 
wrote:
> I think the release team is wrong in the first place. Lack of
> maintainership and bugs don't equate to removal. Otherwise there would
> be plenty more applications to remove there...

These were secondary reasons. The main reason is that we never really 
figured out how Documents was intended to be used. The app was 
basically just "bad evince". Cloud integration was of limited quality 
and limited usefulness. Documents get jumbled together, not reflecting 
familiar disk layout, which was intended to be less confusing to users, 
but actually just made the app suck to use. All my attempts to use it 
wound up in my returning to evince. As best I can remember, I don't 
think I've never seen anyone, even at GNOME conferences, using 
Documents. Even Epiphany seems more popular. Removal was requested by 
the previous maintainer, Rishi, and approved by design team (albeit 
after sustained prodding).

My request to Rishi and to the designers was that we either really 
rethink the purpose, use case, workflow, and utility of Documents. And 
after a lot of thinking, we just couldn't figure out how the app really 
fit into our desktop. Maybe if a new maintainer takes over and can find 
answers to those questions, we could reconsider removing it (there's 
still time to reconsider this before 3.32 is released! the removal is 
not set in stone!) but it would really require some sustained design 
and development effort that I don't expect to materialize.

Release and design teams also don't want redundant apps in core, and 
there is interest in somewhat reducing the number of apps in core. We 
had been planning for several years to remove eog (obsoleted by 
gnome-photos and to remove evince with gnome-documents. Now it looks 
like gnome-photos and evince will be the winners instead. (eog is a 
very nice app, but once gnome-photos gains the ability to handle 
images, it becomes kinda redundant, right? I only hesitate due to 
nomenclature: not all images are photos. Maybe gnome-photos needs a 
rename.)

Maybe we should touch in on desktop-devel-list more often to make sure 
the entire community is aware of plans for core apps. Other major goals 
are to obsolete file-roller with nautilus (which we have not yet done 
only because nautilus's archive support is not yet very good) and teach 
gnome-music to open audio files (it's absurd that Videos is our default 
audio player currently).

Michael