[ghns] ghns status, api, etc.

[Jeremy Whiting]

On Monday 22 June 2009 09:50:06 Josef Spillner wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Am Montag, 22. Juni 2009 15:45:28 schrieb Frank Karlitschek:
> > Josef, Jeremy, are you at GCDS? Perhaps we can discuss a few ideas in
> > person.
>
> I will be in the Islas Canarias for several days, but will be available at
> GCDS only until the 7th, not during the BoF days.
>
> > I for one plan to support and push the open collaboration services API
> > in the future. I´m in contact with people from other free software
> > project who plan to support it also.
> > I think it has the biggest potential to become a cross desktop and
> > cross platform standard.
>
> Personally, I'm all for a powerful collaboration services which find
> acceptance among many projects and which scale from single line of code
> invocations (current KNS2 download, for example) to more complex social
> interactions.
>
> It would be good to see a compact analysis of what your methods provide
> over the current functionality. Then there's the difference between REST
> and SOAP APIs although I wouldn't see this as a major strategic issue
> because both could coexist and in fact all modern service framework
> technologies go for single-source dual stacks.

Frank, could you provide Josef with such an analysis of what the opendesktop 
api provides? I agree that both are pretty feasible from the client end also.

> It will also be a requirement that at least one free implementation exists.
> Otherwise, KDE (or ghns.fd.o for that matter) would send out the wrong
> signal about free services and undermine many of the arguments of why
> people should migrate away from closed systems, including closed backend
> services and clouds.
> Have a look at the disaster which is the handling of Amarok bug report
> about libre.fm support (#188952) to see how fast such issues can backfire
> at the developers....

Frank, I think Josef is trying to (subtly?) poke you into possibly opening up 
your sources? Is this possible? that would be very helpful if you could.


Both of you,

From my end (knewstuff2 client) I'd like to expose as much functionality that 
exists on the web interface as possible (and reasonable of course).  In order 
to do that I'm going to need something I think I'm already getting from 
frank's api which is a unique identifier for each entry.  Is that right Frank?  
Josef, if you could provide this that would be excellent, take a look at 
Frank's xml feeds to see how he's added it (and we should add it to the ghns 
spec probably also).

Second I'd like to be able to ask each web api if entry x is updateable.  
There have been numerous wishlist requests to see what's been installed in the 
past via knewstuff2 and I'd like to provide this.  I have all the data in the 
registry I keep of what's been installed, including each entry's xml, so I 
should be able to create a feed in memory of installed items, then ask the 
server each came from to see if it is updateable.  One advantage of this could 
be a button to update all like most package managers have.

Once those two things are functional I think I'd like to get the collaboration 
stuff working for both api's (if you two could agree on some basic stuff like a 
range for voting, size limit (if any) for comments, encoding for e-mail 
addresses so spammers can't just grab them out of the xml directly ;), etc. 
that would be awesome.)

Any thoughts/opinions on the above? These are just some ideas I've had and 
would like to see working sooner than later if possible. What do you think?

thanks,
Jeremy

P.S. Josef, are you on the list? or do we need to keep cc'ing you? ;)