On Tue, 2011-11-29 at 13:37 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
On Tue, 2011-11-29 at 10:18 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> I have to say I share Johann's concerns to some degree. It's quite
> difficult to see why GNOME is going in this direction of considering
> IM / social networking systems to be 'core desktop functionality'. They
> are not. The fact that lots of people use such things does not, in and
> of itself, make them necessarily a core part of the desktop.
The way the dependency works here is that gnome-shell uses the folks
library for displaying contacts as search results in the overview. Folks
has a frontend-backend abstraction with a number of different backends
(for eds, for libsocialweb, for telepathy...). For the purposes of
presenting an integrated experience, we are really mostly interested in
the eds and telepathy backends, while the libsocialweb one was one that
caused this problem... One obvious solution to the 'bad gnome, it
doesn't let me uninstall its bits one-by-one' complaint would be to
break out the folks backends as subpackages. I expect us to hard-require
the eds and telepathy ones in the shell, but the libsocialweb one could
easily be an optional add-on.
That does seem more sensible, yes. I think this isn't just a solution to
a complaint you might see as a bit bogus, but sensible engineering: the
various service-specific backends to a general-purpose library like
folks *should* be modular.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net