Re: [Geary] "Always watch for new mail" preference: better alternatives?

[Michael Gratton <mike vee net>]

Hey Stephen,

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 12:12 PM, Stephen Michel 
<"stephen.michel"@tufts.edu> wrote:
> FWIW, Polari, the gnome irc client, uses "Run in Background" as the 
> name of the option and puts it in the system drop-down menu (although 
> I don't suggest we do the latter; Polari only has this one setting, 
> so it makes sense there).

Oh, that's interesting to know, since there's a good argument for being 
consistent with other apps, if nothing else.

> I'm pretty sure when this is enabled, Polari does start on boot, 
> although there is no tooltip to this effect, so I don't think we 
> should be concerned about confusion here, *particularly* if we add a 
> tooltip with additional explanation.

If it does, it uses a different method than Geary, since enabling that 
didn't create a desktop file in ~/.config/autostart. I'm not sure what 
that might be however.


> >  For me the purpose of "always watch for new mail" was downloading
> >  messages while I was doing something else, so when I opened Geary I
> >  didn't have to wait for the sync and I could start reading right
> >  away.
>
> This is the same reason why I keep the setting enabled, and I don't 
> really see a case for when I would want geary to run in the 
> background but not autostart.

Okay, it's also good to know what people are expecting from this 
feature, thanks.

The use case is of course something like "Ann would like to keep 
receiving new messages after closing all Geary windows". I'm still not 
too convinced that should imply that Geary also has to manage autostart 
itself since that's a different use case, there's existing desktop 
tools to do the same job, and it's going to remain broken for Flatpak 
for a while unless we open up a large security hole in the sandbox.

The biggest argument against it however is that it genuinely seems to 
be confusing for people - we get a number of bug reports stemming from 
the fact that the reporter just didn't realise geary was running in the 
background. So the pref text used in 0.12 and earlier isn't doing a 
good enough job, and as I mentioned before I think that's because the 
one pref is doing way too much work, hence the pref text has to cover a 
lot of ground in five or six words, and that just might not be possible 
without simplifying what the pref does.


> >  to prevent that confusion it's probably
> >  best to not mention notifications in the run-in-the-background pref 
> > at
> >  all, despite it being a useful side-effect.
>
> I have a suggestion here: When notifications are enabled but running 
> in the background is not, display a warning below the background 
> preference (or an exclamation point next to it with a warning 
> mouseover), "You will need to leave geary open in order to recieve 
> notifications."

Making the problem prominent the UI and letting the user handle it is 
certainly one approach, but as mentioned previously the pref will 
probably go away at some point (also in favour of using 
already-existing desktop tools to manage it), and we don't reliably 
know if notifications are actually being shown regardless of whether 
the pref is enabled or not, making it difficult to know when such a 
warning should actually be shown, and possibly also making the warning 
bad advice unless it also mentions enabling notifications in the 
control centre, which might not be applicable to all desktops.

For what it's worth, I've already updated the preference text in 
master, but not removed support for autostart. I think I'm going to sit 
on it for a while and see if that helps, at least until after the next 
major release.

//Mike

--
⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>