On Thu, 15 Mar 2018 at 10:39:39 +0000, Bob Ham wrote: > My colleague François Téchené recently wrote a blog post³ proposing a > unified UX using a "feature"-based approach rather than an > application-based approach. This proposal comes from the ideas of > Ethical Design⁴. The technological underpinnings of this UX are already > largely extant in Telepathy.
Unfortunately, the technological underpinnings of that UX are also a large part of why Telepathy is no longer actively developed. Designing an abstraction across protocols that are not "the same shape" is really hard. Maintaining that abstraction in Telepathy soaked up a lot of developer time, and the need to keep that abstraction API-stable made it disproportionately hard to add new features (which is why, as previously noted, Telepathy had trouble keeping up with "modern XMPP": adding a new feature required touching at least three projects, and making it API-stable often required investigating multiple protocols to make sure the API would fit them all). (For instance, the call-centric design of telephony and the non-patent-encumbered subset of SIP supported by Telepathy are unlike the roster-centric design of XMPP, while the hard division between one-to-one messages and chatrooms in XMPP is unlike the variable-number-of-users "switchboards" in the now-defunct MSNP.) If the UX that your users expect is very much "the same shape" for a pair of protocols, then perhaps it makes sense to have an abstraction across those protocols; but is that really the case for all of them? smcv _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list