Re: GNOME Online Accounts 3.34 won't have documents support

[Debarshi Ray <rishi is lostca se>]

Hey,

I hadn't expected this to garner so much interest!

Instead of replying to each message separately, I'll try to summarize
a few things into this message.

First of all, this thread doesn't have anything to do with GNOME
Books. It's a separate application and doesn't have any Online
Accounts integration whatsoever. Books shares the gnome-documents Git
repository with GNOME Documents, and that's all. I can't even find it
in gnome-build-meta, which is again a separate discussion:
  [rishi@kolache gnome-build-meta]$ git grep gnome-books
  [rishi@kolache gnome-build-meta]$

Second, "evince" is a lot of different things. It could mean:
* everything that's in evince.git
* the libevdocument3.so.4 and libevview3.so.3 APIs
* /usr/bin/evince - the thing that opens files from Nautilus
* /usr/bin/evince-previewer - this is used for the GTK print preview,
  as Emmanuele pointed out, and has NoDisplay=true
* /usr/bin/evince-thumbnailer

So, for some definition of "evince", GNOME Documents has a hard
dependency on it. Ideally, the evince Git repository would be split to
disambiguate some of these components as far upstream as possible,
instead of relying on the various downstreams to get their packaging
right. But that's also a separate discussion. :)

It's true that GNOME Documents was conceived as a way to seamlessly
access all files local and remote. In that sense, the Online Accounts
integration is crucial for it.

However, it has turned out to be more complicated than that.  I also
don't know how excited the GNOME designers are about GNOME Documents
today.

For various reasons, it doesn't stand any chance of adoption unless it
can open files like /usr/bin/evince.

"Documents" are also notoriously complicated, as compared to music,
photos or videos. For example, if somebody is working on a thesis,
then everything from graphs to PDFs to the textual LaTeX sources to
screenshots can be considered a document.  That's almost impossible to
accommodate within the current reality of GNOME Documents.

Lack of prior art. Every major OS out there has some equivalent of a
music, photos or videos application, but I haven't come across
anything like GNOME Documents with the possible exception of Google
Documents.

It's somewhat difficult to get people excited about, and is related to
the above point. It's much easier to get people excited about music,
photos or videos, because those are "fun", while documents are
"boring".  See how people go crazy about Google Photos at Google I/O,
or Instagram, etc.. I don't see that many people go crazy about their
PDF viewer.

So, can it be saved? Maybe; if we are willing to diverge from it's
original goals.

If somebody (hey, Christopher) wants to give GNOME Documents a fresh
lease of life, I think the addition of a file previewer has to be the
first priority. GNOME Documents supports a lot more formats than
Evince, so, done right, this could be an advantage. The widgets for
rendering ebooks, Evince and LibreOffice formats would need some
scrubbing for this.

Exploiting the capabilities of the LOKView widget, plus some work on
LibreOffice itself, could turn GNOME Documents into a sleek and
stripped down word processor. That's another idea.

Neither of these things require the Online Accounts integration,
though.

Cheers,
Rishi