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

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Wed, 2019-01-23 at 19:47 +0000, Debarshi Ray wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 05:39:44PM +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > As Emmanuele mentioned, the problem isn't so much that services
> > will
> > disappear from under the applications (but it's a problem
> > nonetheless),
> > it's that there was no communication explaining that applications
> > shouldn't have relied on GNOME Online Accounts in the first place,
> > as
> > the functionality could disappear for reasons not caused by those
> > services, or applications.
>
> You are talking as if the application maintainer and the GNOME Online
> Account maintainer are two disjoint entities. As if an active
> community of contributors have been jeopardized by the arbitrary will
> of the mythical GOA maintainer.
>
> That's false.

You dropped maintainership of gnome-documents, we're now dropping it
from core GNOME, and by removing the Documents integration from GOA,
you're crippling the application, whoever the new maintainer ends up
being.

> [rishi@kolache gnome-documents]$ git shortlog -ns | head
>   1036 Cosimo Cecchi
>    357 Debarshi Ray
>     78 Alessandro Bono
>     76 Daniel Mustieles
>     68 Piotr Drag
>     59 Bastien Nocera
>     52 Kjartan Maraas
>     39 Marek Cernocky
>     36 Matej Urbancic
>     36 William Jon McCann
>
> Since everybody is concerned about the Online Accounts integration,
> let's look at gnome-online-miners.git. That's where the said
> integration lives.
>
> [rishi@kolache gnome-online-miners]$ git shortlog -ns | head
>    101 Debarshi Ray
>      6 Pranav Kant
>
> And I am just not going to bother digging up review statistics from
> Bugzilla. ;)
>
> I was also the only maintainer at least pretending to keep up with
> the
> GNOME schedule.
>
>
> There wasn't any active community.
>
> We regularly released with glaring bugs that some of our downstreams
> would consider blockers.  Fedora releases would have blocked, had
> those bugs been known. They weren't known because very few people, if
> any, ever used the application, so nobody ever reported them.
>
> RHEL 7.x releases actually did block on those bugs. That's how those
> eventually got noticed, fixed and backported.
>
> Boy, did I spend hours diligently backporting all those fixes,
> spinning tarballs, doing downstream builds. Sometimes the backports
> went across three or four stable branches - that's how glaring and
> old
> some of the bugs were. Not a soul cared.
>
> These bugs were regressions introduced by the occasional patch that
> would get merged, or by changes in our JavaScript stack, or something
> else. The upshot being that the reviewers themselves weren't using
> the
> application much, or didn't have enough time to diligently review the
> patches; nor did it have any users in the wider GNOME community and
> beyond.
>
> It was also clear that the GNOME designers weren't that excited about
> GNOME Documents any more.
>
>
> Yes, I could have started by listing all the reasons behind why
> Documents is considered a dead-end. I didn't do that, so I am very
> sorry about that.

Right, this is it. Thanks.

> However, I did give a brief background in my very next email to this
> thread. Cosimo, Michael, Jakub and Allan were all part of the
> discussions about it's future.
>
> But then, I haven't yet found anybody honestly asking why we gave up
> on it. Instead people went ahead and drew whatever conclusions they
> wanted to draw. I find that odd.
>
> It's not like this is the first time we have dropped things from
> GNOME
> Online Accounts. Back in 2017 [1] we had dropped Telepathy. I had
> written a wall of text explaining that decision. Guess how many
> replies that thread got.  Surely, Telepathy has had a lot more users
> in its time than Documents.
>
> So, I do find it strange that people are suddenly coming out of the
> woodwork passionately fighting for the survival of GNOME Documents.

It's not Documents. It's Documents, and Pocket, and email integration,
which brings about the viability of applications ever integrating with
gnome-online-accounts, lest they be crippled.

> [1] 
> https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2017-October/msg00040.html