Emmanuele Bassi via desktop-devel-list <desktop-devel-list gnome org> wrote:
...
>> We have a rule though: the account types exposed in
>> gnome-online-accounts must be used by at least one core application.
>> It's a good rule because it doesn't make sense to have settings in
>> control-center for apps that aren't installed by default.
>From a UX perspective I think this makes sense. It's a bit strange if
we have an out of the box experience where the switches in the online
accounts settings don't do anything.
This approach isn't new, and you can read more detail here:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeOnlineAccounts/Goals
I know the rationale. I never particularly agreed with it, because it felt like an ex post rationalisation about not having third party modules, and getting people to commit functionality upstream. To be honest, I think it was a bad idea not to provide a proper platform for this kind of integration for third party applications and let people reimplement things in their own silos; but given the constant lack of resources to the platform, the lack of commitment never actually surprised me.
In any case, I'm not objecting to the rationale at all, nor at removing Documents, or removing the Documents integration with GOA.
What I'm objecting to is the wishy-washy approach of telling people: "Sure, you can keep working on Documents, it's just not going to be installed any more" without telling the whole story.
If Documents is removed, then all the Documents integration within GNOME is also removed, which means that the project *in its current incarnation* should just be archived. People should be encouraged to fork it, if they find it useful, and implement that integration inside Documents itself. This gives the proper context and communicates the proper expectations to people willing to maintain the Documents code base.
There's no point in calling it "GNOME Documents" if it's not a) part of core and b) integrated with the facilities GNOME provides to its core applications.
>> So unless we
>> reverse course and add gnome-documents back to core, the documents
>> account configuration settings should move from control-center to
>> gnome-documents itself.
>
> So you're asking that an application with known resource problems re-implements functionality that was offloaded to a GNOME component in the first place. This work, by the way, may or may not be dropped in case we change our minds, and find a use case for Documents to be in the core apps in the future.
>
> At this point it would be much more honest to come forward and say: "GNOME Documents is no more. If you want to work on it, fork it and call it whatever".
I don't think it's fair to make accusations of dishonesty. Michael and
Debarshi have been open about what's happening and the consequences,
and I think that's to be commended.
I didn't say it was malicious. I said it wasn't honest in the sense that we've spent the whole thread justifying dropping Documents, and picking up a new maintainer, and nobody explicitly communicated the fact that if you want to work on Documents from now on you'll be doing it as a third party developer, because there's no integration within GNOME any more.
Ciao,
Emmanuele.
