Almost two weeks ago, someone on GNOME’s Discourse forum asked whether the missing Google Drive support in GNOME 50 was a bug or a deliberate decision.
GNOME developer Emmanuele Bassi replied, confirming that Drive was no longer supported.
He went on saying that libgdata, the library that coordinates communication between GNOME apps and Google’s APIs, has gone without a maintainer for nearly four years. Furthermore, GVFS dropped its libgdata dependency about ten months ago, and GNOME Online Accounts now checks for that before offering the Files toggle under its Google provider settings at all.
Emmanuele suggested that anyone wanting to restore the feature should reach out to the GVFS maintainer. Chiming in on this, Michael Catanzaro, another GNOME developer, said that libgdata has since been archived on GitLab (linked above), leaving nothing to even contribute to at this point.
Further explaining that:
GNOME had already disabled this functionality years ago, but distros sometimes move slowly. If Fedora had disabled it sooner, then perhaps users would have noticed the problem before the project was archived rather than after. Oh well.
Back in December 2022, Catanzaro had already put out a public call for someone to take over libgdata, warning that the integrations depending on it would eventually stop working if nobody did. That was over three years ago, and nobody ever stepped up.
The issue was not just libgdata itself. It was the only remaining reason libsoup2 was still present in the GNOME stack, at a time when libsoup2 was already being phased out ahead of the GNOME 44 release.
Currently, Debian’s security tracker lists many open CVEs against it, covering everything from HTTP request smuggling to authentication flaws. Keeping libgdata around meant keeping all of those spicy vulnerabilities around too.
A long shot, but…
I like to be delulu every so often, and I think that maybe Google could officially step in? Assigning a developer or two to bring back Drive support could get things rolling; I am aware that they don’t have any shortage of talent after all.
Plus, they are already known to be supporters of open source. Seeing their recent f*ckups, this could be a good win for both their PR team and GNOME users who rely on such support.
Suggested Read 📖: GNOME 50 is here, but ditches X11
