[Shotwell] Don't Downgrade Shotwell

[Lucas Beeler <lucas yorba org>]

Howdy all,

Recently, there's been talk about the procedure for "downgrading" photo libraries from later versions of Shotwell for use with Shotwell 0.12.x. The official response was that this was a really bad idea, since downgrading would require mucking around with your database and could result in data loss. That warning remains absolutely true and correct.

But there's a big problem with running older versions of Shotwell that doesn't involve the database at all: web publishing may not work. What's more, even if it works now, it could break any time. During the time Shotwell was evolving as a product, web services (including Facebook, Flickr, and Google+/Picasa) transitioned from using proprietary, service-specific authentication methods like Google's ClientLogin (1) to using the OAuth "standard" (I use quotes because OAuth isn't really a standard so much as an authentication flow model (2) with several service-specific flavors). Only in Shotwell 0.14 was the full OAuth flow model and its various service-specific adaptations implemented in Shotwell for all services.

I know there's been quite a bit of talk in the community about some decisions Canonical has made and that, as a result, some people have decided to move from Ubuntu to Debian Wheezy. All of this speaks to our vibrant, opinionated community -- which is awesome. But if you're a heavy Shotwell web services user, I'd highly recommend *not* downgrading below Shotwell 0.14. Else publishing may become ugly. Very ugly.

(1)

https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/AuthForInstalledApps

(2)

http://developer.yahoo.com/oauth/guide/oauth-auth-flow.html