Breakout: UI and user vision for cloud services

[Martin Klapetek]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Jonathan Riddell <jr at jriddell.org> wrote:

> <Sho_> * Services integration - I see more and more users who have
> data locked up in clouds (GDrive, etc.) and rely on accessing it
>     <Sho_> Gnome has GDrive integration, we need to do more on getting
> cloud filesystems into our software too, but we dropped the ball on
> KAccounts etc. for now
>

As the former KAccounts maintainer, I'd like to share some insights on this.

The tech is there. It's proven by real world usage in Ubuntu (incl. Phone),
Meego before that (iirc) and to some extent also Gnome, which has its own
fork of the same thing (I guess they just really don't like Qt anywhere).
Also
Elementary is using one of these, but I don't remember which. And if I'm
not mistaken, also Jolla in their phones.

So we have the tech, but what we're missing are two things, really.

1) Things actually using it. We've had KAccounts for a while but there was
nothing taking advantage of it, except KDE Telepathy, which migrated fully
to it. So it sort of became a synonym for KTp accounts config. On the other
hand, there was nothing much else that would actually need it. There was
an OwnCloud lib or Plasma thingy at some point where I pleaded to have the
account setup done through (K)Accounts to boost the adoption, but it never
happened. Related to that is...

2) Buy in from PIM. I mean, let's face it, the real accounts user in the
system
is PIM, with all the emails and calendars and contacts and what not. This
obviously requires quite some large effort to actually migrate everything to
it and sadly the PIM team is long time understaffed. Now with the new Sink
thing, this could have been a chance, but, again, after asking couple times
about the accounts plan, (K)Accounts was never in the picture. And that's
a problem.

And so now we have this system that nobody in/around KDE wants to use.
My take on it is that people (devs) don't really understand how that system
works and how to take advantage of it, which is partly my fault. It is
fairly
complex system on the inside with lots of points of possible breakages, but
also allows for great flexibility all around.

So, imho, in order to successfully follow literally every other desktop
these
days, it needs a proper full integration in all things using accounts. And
it really
shouldn't be just an afterthought. It needs to be put right at the core of
those
things and workflows should be redesigned to take that into account (heh).
It
needs to be a conscious community-wide effort, like Frameworks was.
Otherwise
KAccounts will stay exactly where it is now - a promising (egg-)shell that
has no
real use.

Unfortunately if the past two years are any indication, especially with
Sink,
the road ahead is not very bright.

I'm happy to try my best to answer any possible future questions about the
system
you might have. Friedrich Kossebau was also writing a tutorial about it at
some
point, but I'm not sure where it ended up (if at all; I also failed to
follow up on that).

Cheers
-- 
Martin Klapetek
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/attachments/20161018/9e40b02b/attachment.html>