On Jul 21, 2014 2:46 PM, "Rodney Dawes" <rodney.da...@canonical.com> wrote: > Friends is nowhere near suitable for packaging as a click, so putting it > in the store isn't really an option. It's a long-running Python process > with plug-ins, and would need quite a lot of work to make it suitable as > a click package.
Oh, but that's just the beginning. Friends inherited a long-running python process from its predecessor, gwibber. When we began developing Friends, we looked for away to avoid the long running Python process purely to avoid large memory usage of python data structures. The solution we found at the time (keep in mind this was before the application lifecycle policy had crystallized) was to make a long-running Vala process, which used dbus invocation to trigger the python logic when needed, and then python would exit when done, freeing it's memory. That was a nice workaround at the time (this literally saved hundreds of MBs of RAM from being constantly eaten by Friends at all times), but unfortunately the long running Vala process is still in violation of the app lifecycle policy, which alone is enough to prevent it from being click packaged, but the problem is made worse by the fact that the python bits of Friends need to be installed at well-known system locations in order for dbus to find and invoke it, which click packages are not capable of installing. So, next cycle, if enough people show enough interest to revive Friends, it will be necessary to rewrite it without using dbus (which is a big chunk of it), and also without the long running process. It can be done, for sure, but my money is on the webapps getting better and surpassing feature parity anyway. Webapps have the strong advantage of a) already being click apps (which means we can easily add features to them retroactively, even after RTM), b) allowing access to all social network features rather than just sending and receiving messages, and c) not running afoul of third party API access token limitations (the twitter support in friends has an extremely low user limit, which means once Ubuntu phone reaches critical mass, twitter support would just vanish out from under us, but Twitter's webapp won't. I'm really flattered that you like Friends so much, Sam, but unfortunately the Ubuntu phone evolved out from under it and it no longer makes sense to ship with the phone.
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