ulc-devs team mailing list archive

[Frederik Elwert <frederik.elwert@xxxxxx>]

Hi,

Am Freitag, den 04.11.2011, 15:54 -0300 schrieb
pablo.a.saavedra@xxxxxxxxx:
> how are you doing? So, I have a barely working contact lens written in
> Vala and using libfolks (based on the Music lens). Do you want to base
> the lens on that or just start one from scratch in Python? The good
> thing I see about Vala is that the gnome-contacts application is
> written in Vala, so we may take ideas from it.

thank you for your e-mail.

Just a short remark for the start: I am intrinsically interested in a
contancts lens for Unity. I wrote a deskbar plugin for contacts search
back in the days when deskbar was the central search facility for the
desktop, and I make heavy use of it. So I am willing to contribute to
create such a lens.

On the other hand, I am just a hobby programmer. So I do not necessarily
have to be the team leader or something. I just created the launchpad
team and project to establish a central meeting point for all interested
contributors. If anybody more capable than me steps forward and wants to
take the lead, I am happy to pass team ownership.

Regarding the technical decisions: If it were only for me, I would
probably have started by converting my python deskbar plugin into a
unity lens, using EDS for searching and my python port of the old
contact-lookup-applet for displaying the contacts details. That would
have been the least work for me, but not necessarily the best solution.

Regarding the best components to use, these are my 2 cent:

      * libfolks: Makes probably sense, I can think of no disadvantage
        compared with pure EDS, and we get some extras.
      * vala vs. python: I do only know python, so I would have to learn
        vala before I could contribute in terms of code. I am not sure
        how fast I could manage to learn enough vala to be actually able
        to create something useful. So while I have nothing against vala
        on a technical level, python might have the advantage of
        lowering the entry barrier.
      * GNOME Contacts integration: We could use g-c for displaying
        contact information instead of using our own dialog. On the
        other hand, having a more streamlined interface would be nice
        (e.g., hiding the contacts list). Maybe one could discuss this
        with the g-c devs once we have something basically working.

So I think the decision we would have to make first is the programming
language. What do you think? Stay with vala, or start over with python?

Regards
Frederik