Re: [Geary] Geary/Mail collab

[Daniel Foré <daniel elementaryos org>]

Hey Mike,

Sounds good. Definitely let me know if you think of anything :)

Cheers,
Daniel Foré

> On Apr 9, 2016, at 7:11 PM, Michael Gratton <mike vee net> wrote:
>
>
> Hey Daniel,
>
> No problem, I  hope the EDS port goes well! Yeah, I think getting away from the tree views is probably a 
> good idea as well.
>
> It looks like there might not be much common ground for collaboration at the moment, but let's keep an eye 
> out for any possibilities in the future.
>
> Cheers,
> //Mike
>
> -- 
> ⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
> ⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>
>
>
> > On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 2:17 AM, Daniel Foré <daniel elementaryos org> wrote:
> > Hey Mike,
> > That's probably not an inaccurate assessment. We don't really intend to build a GNOME 3 app. I think we're 
> > pretty all-in on switching to EDS. Maintaining a custom IMAP backend seems like a lot of development 
> > burden and our users are asking for features that EDS would provide like exchange support.
> > We are definitely looking into porting the message list to gtk.listbox instead of that custom cell 
> > renderer. For the folder list, we'll most likely use granite.sourcelist. There was some talk of creating a 
> > gtk.stacksidebar subclass.
> > Cheers,
> > Daniel Foré
> > > On Apr 4, 2016, at 4:15 AM, Michael Gratton <mike vee net> wrote:
> > > Hey Daniel,
> > > It's good to hear Elementary's plans for Mail, thanks for getting back to us. I've always been keen to 
> > > see Geary moving towards the GNOME3 HIG, and since Elementary has its own visual identity and set of 
> > > foundational UI widgets, I have been assuming that some divergence in the UI was going to be likely. 
> > > After a quick look at Mail's code changes and screenshots, that does indeed seem to be the case.
> > > So given that, one possible avenue for collaboration would be to split the IMAP backend out of Geary/Mail 
> > > and maintain it a a separate standalone library, one that both Geary and Mail could both use and 
> > > contribute to, while the two teams focus on making our respective frontends provide the best possible UX 
> > > for our respective desktops. The engine is a large chunk of Geary's codebase, so this would spread the 
> > > maintenance burden.
> > > I guess on that basis it's not surprising you're looking at switching over to EDS as a backend. 
> > > Regardless of whether Geary sticks with the existing backend or also switches over to EDS, that only 
> > > really leaves foundational and utility libraries like GTK and GMime left in common. Maybe there's still 
> > > some widgets that could be shared - the folder and conversation lists and conversation viewer perhaps? 
> > > But that seems like a lot of work for a small gain, and again they might diverge as well.
> > > It sounds like you may not have made a completely final decision to switch to EDS, and if that doesn't 
> > > work out then we'd be happy to work with the Mail team on a librarified version of engine, and regardless 
> > > of that on any other parts of the codebase that makes sense to split out. Aside from that, I can't think 
> > > of too many other ways we could directly help each other.
> > > Anyway, have I overstated the UX divergence? Is there some other large chunk of shareable code I'd 
> > > forgotten about? What do you think?
> > > //Mike
> > > > On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 2:13 AM, Daniel Fore <daniel elementaryos org> wrote:
> > > > So we actually didn't do the webkit2 port just yet. We did the native widgets port first so we could 
> > > > minimize the use of the webview. As far as the conversation view goes, I think the only use of granite 
> > > > is because we have an avatar widget in granite trunk (bzr term for master) these days.
> > > > This is working very well for us, using only native Gtk widgets. Gtk.CSS is really powerful these days 
> > > > and with a couple revealers and such we still have all the nice animations and features like collapsing 
> > > > and that. We are currently including a basic stylesheet so that it doesn't look too awful in other 
> > > > themes.
> > > > We have indeed been trying to migrate code from Geary code style to elementary code style. It just makes 
> > > > things a little nicer for developers at elementary who are bouncing from project to project. I've 
> > > > personally done a lot of work trying to get rid of things like the PillHeaderBar. I think it just makes 
> > > > the code really hard to read and is a bit over-engineered.
> > > > We technically have an elementary developer mailing list, but honestly nobody uses it. Everything is 
> > > > done in Slack these days. I've sent invites to Mike and Adam. Let me know if anyone else would like 
> > > > invites. We're more than happy to chat about things that might be useful for you folks.
> > > > The really big thing that we've been on lately is actually to port Mail over to an Evolution Data Server 
> > > > backend. We've been doing work upstream on completing GObject Introspection for LibCamel and one of our 
> > > > guys has some ideas about making the API a bit nicer in general. He's had a lot of success pushing 
> > > > branches already, so that's great. One of our other guys is working on a little prototype app before we 
> > > > try to actually make the conversion. You can see the code for that here: 
> > > > https://github.com/matzipan/eds-sample
> > > > Let me know if you have any questions about Mail and I'll do my best to try to address them :)
> > > --
> > > ⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
> > > ⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>