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

[Allan Day <aday gnome org>]

Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> wrote:
...
> > We are currently in the 3.31.x / 3.32 development cycle. Once the
> > GNOME 3.32 release is done, starting from 3.33.1, I will be removing
> > the GNOME Documents specific integration points from GNOME Online
> > Accounts because we no longer encourage distributors to ship this
> > application as part of the default set.
...
> That also means that GNOME Documents is as good as dead if you do this,
> because the main use for it was to have a single point of entry for
> Cloud and local documents.

I've spent a fair while trying to figure out what the future is for
Documents and I haven't been able to come up with a good answer.
However, that doesn't mean I'm closed to the idea!

The key issue, I think, is what Michael alluded to in the other thread
- what the value proposition for Documents is. My feeling is that
aggregating local files and Google Docs isn't all that compelling.

My impression is that "documents" is quite an amorphous category,
which nowadays is often equated with "files". Documents was always
closely tied to Google Docs, but then Google Drive came out and that's
what people generally seem to care about nowadays.

Having a top-notch Google Drive client would be great and who knows,
maybe that's something that Documents could become? (Not sure how that
would relate to GVFS's Google Drive support though.)

> 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...

Yes I think we need a good UX vision and an understanding of the role
we want each app to play. Design obviously has a role to play in
communicating that, so I'm sorry if we haven't done that.

Allan