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

[Debarshi Ray <rishi is lostca se>]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 08:02:16PM +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Wed, 2019-01-23 at 18:52 +0000, Debarshi Ray wrote:
> > Grep for "Future of Pocket in GNOME" from 24th August 2018 in your
> > inbox.
>
> Which solves what? You're removing the Documents and Mail categories,
> you're removing Pocket support.

Two things.

First, we are talking about GNOME Documents, GNOME Online Accounts,
GNOME ..., etc.. We are talking about GNOME.

If you are not going to respond to a thread that has run for six
months, on a topic that you care about, then I am sorry, I can't
assume good faith. Those who participated agreed that they don't have
time to work on Pocket, nor is the current state of affairs very
good. That's how we decided to drop it.

> Reading that mail you mentioned won't bring those features back. It's
> far from the first time you've wanted to remove Pocket support from
> GOA, as if it was a time sink, and a maintenance pain.
>
> I just don't understand the strategy of disabling/removing features and
> services, breaking apps on newer hosts.

We have always, since the very first days when David Zeuthen was
around, pushed back against adding random accounts to GOA. We have
always said that the integration should be meaningful to a good cross
section of users, that there should be a default application or OS
component, etc..

This is nothing new. We eventually wrote it down as
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeOnlineAccounts/Goals

The Pocket integration doesn't do much. You yourself said that you
seldom use it.

We regularly refuse requests to add random accounts to GOA. Just look
at the enhancement requests left open on Bugzilla. There are lots more
that I have dealt with from other channels. It isn't fair that we turn
down other requests, but keep Pocket in.

It certainly is a maintenance burden. It's a burden when one has to
port away from deprecated GLib and WebKit APIs, it's a burden
when someone has to tweak the base-classes to accommodate yet
another quirky service provider or to just repay some technical debt
and clean things up.

But it's a burden we can carry as long as we have someone committed to
push it forward towards a better future. That future need not be in
two months time, but it has to be something that's more realistic than
unicorns.