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

[Debarshi Ray <rishi is lostca se>]

Hey Emmanuele,

(I am summarizing a few other sub-threads here.)

On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 06:45:50PM +0000, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Jan 2019 at 18:36, Debarshi Ray <rishi is lostca se> wrote:
> > What isn't possible is to mix and match API keys with account types at
> > run-time. That doesn't seem trivial to implement - neither from a code
> > nor a design perspective. Possible, sure; trivial, no.
>
> I didn't say "trivial", but I didn't expect this to be hard. You, of
> course, know better than me how hard it would be, so I'll defer to your
> assessment.

The tl;dr here is that a lot of people care about political arguments
but nobody shows up to bear the burden of dealing with the code.

While we have lots of arguments about where the Google or Facebook logo
should come from, and which switch should go where, etc. nobody is
interested in implementing the Google or Facebook SDKs or keeping up
with changes as the provider evolves their services. Nobody.

I bet there are less than 10 people who know what libzapojit is. ;)

So, unless the number of people working on our SDKs (ie. libgdata,
libgfbgraph, etc.) increase dramatically, all these grand plans that
people put forward are meaningless. We would spent a ton of design and
coding effort into building the perfect single sign-on framework, but
you won't be able to use Google Drive because the over-the-wire
communication would be broken.

This is why, from my point of view, it's better to have a simpler,
more straightforward GOA, because then we can invest whatever little
resources we have to keep our SDKs alive.

People here are up in arms about Google Drive support. Strangely
enough, I was the one who kept it alive by rewriting libgdata, and
wrote the GVfs backend for it. Eventually I dumped it all on Ondrej
Holy, and I am sure he now feels as if the sky is falling on his head.

It so happens that we have half a dozen notifications from Facebook
and Google about our uses of their APIs at varying degrees of
seriousness. They are still on my todo list.  Thankfully, Philip
Withnall and Michael Catanzaro are on top of the Google part, but only
barely.  I am worried that most of our Facebook integration has
stopped working.

Secondly, applications like Empathy, Evolution, Geary and Shotwell
were never interested in betting the farm on GNOME and GOA. Some just
didn't want to use GOA - plain and simple.

For example, I recall talking to Jim Nelson from Yorba during GUADEC
2012, and he said that Yorba really cared about presenting their own
brand identity when interacting with Flickr using Shotwell. It would
have been terribly rude if a GNOME distributor decided to downstream
patch Shotwell to make it use GOA and replaced the Yorba brand with
something else. This is what Ubuntu did, by the way, for their own
Ubuntu Online Accounts stuff. Jim was bitter about how the patches
introduced crashes, etc. etc..

Others like Evolution cared a lot about working well on XFCE or GNOME
forks like the Unity-based Ubuntu, which didn't have GOA.

Whatever, the specific story was, they had their own separate
account management anyway.

Now in 2019, Geary has GOA support, but that's neither because they
chose to be GNOME Mail nor because I encouraged them. I helped answer
questions, that's all. See:
  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=714876
  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=746705

Maybe it will be GNOME Mail now? I don't know.

Also, this thread has nothing to do with email or Geary or whatever.
It's about a weakly maintained application that nobody used, and
one which we chose to retire to refocus our efforts elsewhere.

I do think that GNOME is better served caring about a small subset of
providers and services - those that we are serious about supporting,
and have (or will have) high quality applications offering the user
facing features. We should evolve the design and code in whichever
direction that takes us.

What we shouldn't do is get into architecture astronauting and
political arguments about getting everybody's favourite logo into the
Online Accounts panel.

Cheers,
Rishi