Re: Open questions regarding new messenger and secushare and organization Was: Make GNUnet Great Again

[Alessio Vanni]

Martin Schanzenbach <mschanzenbach@posteo.de> writes:

> tl;dr:
> - Should we move towards a monolithic gnunet.git repo which includes
> gtk/secushare again?
> - Should we instead move optional components (conversation, reclaim,
> messenger) out of gnunet.git as extensions?

Hello,

I want to express my opinion on the matter, if it might interest you:
personally, I'd first make a distinction between high-level and
low-level services (or client/service couples), then decide which
belongs to core and which can be considered "external" applications.

Of course, low-level stuff is something that GNUnet can't live without
and thus must live in the same repo.

secushare, conversation, reclaim and messenger look very high-level to
me, and the first three in particular are essentially complete
applications building on top of GNUnet, so I believe it's ok to keep
them separated and have people install/build them only if they need it,
something that can't really happen (from my experience, that is) with
pre-compiled packages that usually try to fit as many features as
possible to cover everything.

I kept messenger out because even though it's designed for chats, taking
a glance at the API I think it could be used for other applications too
with some fiddling here and there, but I haven't actually used it so I
don't really know.  Anyway, the point is that unlike, say, conversation,
it /could/ be considered a "core" protocol.

On the other hand, gnunet-gtk looks more like a tool akin to
gnunet-cadet or gnunet-gns, so I think it should be moved in the core
repository.  That way, packagers can distribute it and users can use it
out-of-the-box, which I think it's great for overall usability.

My two cents.

A.V.