ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Robert Park <robert.park@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jul 21, 2014 2:46 PM, "Rodney Dawes" <rodney.dawes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.