ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Rasmus Eneman <Rasmus@xxxxxxxxx>]

Will the webapps ever support notifications?
On Jul 22, 2014 12:12 AM, "Robert Park" <robert.park@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> 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.
>
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