Re: GNOME Online Accounts 3.34 won't have documents support

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Mon, 28 Jan 2019 at 11:40, Debarshi Ray <rishi is lostca se> wrote:

On Sun, Jan 27, 2019 at 12:13:26PM +0000, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> Again, not a huge deal; sure, Documents is actually useful to navigate
> through the Google Drive contents???the Drive web UX has become shockingly
> bad over the years, unsurprisingly since its a fate that befalls every
> Google application???but we can live without it, and it seems it's a niche
> usage to begin with.

GTK3 and GTK4 don't have a credible list or grid widget. We literally
don't have anything to implement 90% of the GNOME Documents UI. There's
no way Google's web UI can be worse than that.

Oh, trust me: it's worse.

 

Also, porting GNOME Documents to GTK4 involves LibreOffice work.

 

Indeed, that is a problem that is not easy to solve without dropping functionality from Documents. It's probably a justification alone from dropping Documents from the release, and archiving it, assuming we ever want to port Documents to GTK 4.

 

> Again: maybe Documents isn't used. Maybe Photos, Music, and whatever else
> aren't used either.

Whether it's used or not is only a part of the story. It's death by a
thousand paper cuts.

I already provided a list of issues GNOME Documents elsewhere.
 

And I already told you that I'm not advocating for Documents to be kept on life support, or that you should keep the Documents integration in GOA because of reasons.

I told you that removing things is perfectly okay, as long as we communicate this upfront.

 

> Who knows, we don't have metrics, right?

We have metrics, yes.

No, we really don't, I'm sorry.

 

We have enough metrics to gauge if:
(a) an application has more than an infinitesimally small number of users
(b) an application has an active enough contributor community

Both (a) and (b) were coming out false for an extended period of time for
GNOME Documents.

Sitting behind multiple bug trackers (in my case GNOME, Fedora and RHEL)
provides enough indication about (a). Insights into the RHEL customer and
user base is another. RHEL 8 dropped GNOME Documents around the same time
as both Fedora and RHEL 8 adopted GNOME Photos. You might not believe it,
but I played almost no role there.

Bug trackers are an awful metric, with a clear and demonstrable bias.

Unless you have instrumented the session in RHEL to give you numbers on how many people launch Documents and how much time they spend on it, then looking at the installation numbers in RHEL paints only a very limited picture.

Nevertheless, as I said: I don't *care* about Documents. I care about the fact that we've added and removed things from GOA without establishing even a scrap of a process.

If you stopped from lashing out at everyone you think is questioning your ability to do your job for just *five minutes* you'd have realised that this thread could have ended 80 emails ago; you just needed to open a wiki page and write down what the process for adding a new service and removing an existing service in GOA works, and what are applications supposed to do in either case.

We do not have an exact measure of the number of active human users from
Flathub, but we do have the number of times an application has been
downloaded. Those numbers are influenced by the number of people who
bothered to install the application or had it offered by their distributor,
that's (a), and the frequency of updates to the Flatpak, that's (b).

 

Again, those numbers do not give you an accurate representation of use. Downloads are *one* metric, and one that's not even very good. Before 3.30 we didn't have automatic Flatpak updates, which means downloading manually whenever you remember to do so; with 3.30 we have automatic updates, which means unless people actively uninstall an app, it'll still appear in the stats. We don't know how many people install an application once; how long does a session last; what kind of interaction there is; if it's used for remote work or not.

 

>  - we do have a user base, and we need to communicate changes effectively
> so that we don't spend cycles constantly defending our decisions; that
> stuff is exhausting.
>  - we have a software development platform, and we'd like for app
> developers to use it; we need to have processes in place to communicate our
> expectations with second/third parties.

Except, all that you accomplished in this thread is to scare the Deja
Dup community into believing GNOME or GOA or whatever is actively
harmful or hostile to them.

You must have read a very different thread from the one I read, because every one of your emails is a demonstration that nobody should use GOA at all, unless it's a system service like the Shell which has no UX for authorising access to things like the Calendar.

Not only you have been lashing out at everyone in this thread that told you something you didn't like to the point of throwing out wild accusations of slander or digging out every single pet bug you ever encountered as a demonstration that since nobody is perfect then you should be authorised to do whatever you want without repercussions, something that ought to give pause to anybody wanting to work with you; but you also plainly demonstrated that GOA's offerings are predicated on requirements of different stakeholders than applications. Again, that's fine: core applications can depend on GOA, for as long as we consider them core applications, and once we don't consider them core applications any more, we can just drop them. I just don't see why on earth would any second/third party application would ever want to, or could, depend on GOA at all.

Anyway, this is going to be my last contribution to this thread. You're free to do whatever you want with the projects you maintain, just like everybody else.

Ciao,

 Emmanuele.

--

https://www.bassi.io
[@] ebassi [@gmail.com]