Breakout: UI and user vision for cloud services

[Elvis Angelaccio]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 5:17 AM, Martin Klapetek
<martin.klapetek at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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).


Hi Martin,
I'm planning to integrate KAccounts with kio-gdrive, so your email is
very much appreciated.
What exactly is "Kaccounts" in the first place? Are we talking about
the kaccounts-integration repo?
A tutorial would be great, but maybe is enough to look at the KDE
Telepathy usage. Could you share more details about this?

>
> Cheers
> --
> Martin Klapetek

Cheers
Elvis