Re: Initial Thoughts

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Fri, 2010-11-05 at 10:35 +0000, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Bastien Nocera wrote on 04/11/10 19:32:
> >
> > On Thu, 2010-11-04 at 15:05 +0000, Calum K Pringle wrote:
> >...
> >> *   Another thought I would like to raise is that of application
> >>     specific settings; for example Empathy has instant messaging
> >>     accounts that are used mainly in Empathy but could be used in
> >>     other applications as well, so should the setting exist inside
> >>     empathy or separate like “Messaging and Voip Accounts”. Should
> >>     these be retitled to settings for those applications only, and
> >>     then live inside an “Internet” heading of preferences? This
> >>     then acknowledges the rapidly changing use of social network
> >>     applications, and when people download applications, there is
> >>     opportunity for developers to have a separate preference
> >>     option?
> > 
> > This should all be integrated into "Web Accounts". Did you look at the
> > mockups available at:
> > http://gitorious.org/gnome-design/gnome-design ?
> > 
> > There's already a mockup for the web accounts stuff, just need a person
> > to work on it.
> >...
> 
> Calum's point is that Gnome is used in operating systems that can
> continue to be used three, seven, even ten years after they're released.
> But the sort of Web services that would be covered by a "Web Accounts"
> panel change much more rapidly, so those settings might make more sense
> in more-updateable applications rather than in global settings.

Not really.

> For example, if you were using an OS with a version of Gnome released
> only three years ago, and the "Web Accounts" panel had existed in Gnome
> back then, possibly it would know about Facebook, but it wouldn't know
> about Twitter. Meanwhile, the version of Gwibber you installed on that
> OS would have its own interface for setting up both, regardless of what
> Gnome did.

I knew about Twitter before Facebook, when Twitter could still send you
tweets through SMS for free in the UK. Paul Cooper was explaining to me
how he used it to send himself server problem notifications.

FWIW, in both cases, we'd have been screwed because the way auth works
for both of these would have changed in the meanwhile.

We use libsocialweb in nautilus-sendto, and even if it's not the top-end
library we end up using to implement the web accounts, it's likely to be
part of the stack.

Saying that "we don't need it in the core desktop because web apps
change too often" is a cop-out, or a way to say that you prefer gwibber.
If/when the web accounts is implemented, Ryan Paul is more than welcome
1) making Gwibber use the system-wide accounts 2) implement the missing
features in the parts of the stack to be able to make Gwibber work as
expected. After that, it's up to him whether Gwibber is just a GTK+ app,
or a GNOME one.

Cheers