Hey Emmanuele, (I am summarizing a few other sub-threads here.)
On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 06:45:50PM +0000, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: > On Wed, 23 Jan 2019 at 18:36, Debarshi Ray <rishi...@lostca.se> wrote: > > What isn't possible is to mix and match API keys with account types at > > run-time. That doesn't seem trivial to implement - neither from a code > > nor a design perspective. Possible, sure; trivial, no. > > I didn't say "trivial", but I didn't expect this to be hard. You, of > course, know better than me how hard it would be, so I'll defer to your > assessment. The tl;dr here is that a lot of people care about political arguments but nobody shows up to bear the burden of dealing with the code. While we have lots of arguments about where the Google or Facebook logo should come from, and which switch should go where, etc. nobody is interested in implementing the Google or Facebook SDKs or keeping up with changes as the provider evolves their services. Nobody. I bet there are less than 10 people who know what libzapojit is. ;) So, unless the number of people working on our SDKs (ie. libgdata, libgfbgraph, etc.) increase dramatically, all these grand plans that people put forward are meaningless. We would spent a ton of design and coding effort into building the perfect single sign-on framework, but you won't be able to use Google Drive because the over-the-wire communication would be broken. This is why, from my point of view, it's better to have a simpler, more straightforward GOA, because then we can invest whatever little resources we have to keep our SDKs alive. People here are up in arms about Google Drive support. Strangely enough, I was the one who kept it alive by rewriting libgdata, and wrote the GVfs backend for it. Eventually I dumped it all on Ondrej Holy, and I am sure he now feels as if the sky is falling on his head. It so happens that we have half a dozen notifications from Facebook and Google about our uses of their APIs at varying degrees of seriousness. They are still on my todo list. Thankfully, Philip Withnall and Michael Catanzaro are on top of the Google part, but only barely. I am worried that most of our Facebook integration has stopped working. Secondly, applications like Empathy, Evolution, Geary and Shotwell were never interested in betting the farm on GNOME and GOA. Some just didn't want to use GOA - plain and simple. For example, I recall talking to Jim Nelson from Yorba during GUADEC 2012, and he said that Yorba really cared about presenting their own brand identity when interacting with Flickr using Shotwell. It would have been terribly rude if a GNOME distributor decided to downstream patch Shotwell to make it use GOA and replaced the Yorba brand with something else. This is what Ubuntu did, by the way, for their own Ubuntu Online Accounts stuff. Jim was bitter about how the patches introduced crashes, etc. etc.. Others like Evolution cared a lot about working well on XFCE or GNOME forks like the Unity-based Ubuntu, which didn't have GOA. Whatever, the specific story was, they had their own separate account management anyway. Now in 2019, Geary has GOA support, but that's neither because they chose to be GNOME Mail nor because I encouraged them. I helped answer questions, that's all. See: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=714876 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=746705 Maybe it will be GNOME Mail now? I don't know. Also, this thread has nothing to do with email or Geary or whatever. It's about a weakly maintained application that nobody used, and one which we chose to retire to refocus our efforts elsewhere. I do think that GNOME is better served caring about a small subset of providers and services - those that we are serious about supporting, and have (or will have) high quality applications offering the user facing features. We should evolve the design and code in whichever direction that takes us. What we shouldn't do is get into architecture astronauting and political arguments about getting everybody's favourite logo into the Online Accounts panel. Cheers, Rishi _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
