support "featured" nextcloud apps
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The official cloudron demo warns here to not install nextcloud apps. https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/nextcloud/#email
This is kind of fine for Rainloop etc. which are integrated (with differing perfection) into cloudron itself anyway.
But.. the Nextcloud Mail App has the label "Featured" and I think cloudron should think about supporting these featured apps.
If it is too much hassle to suppurt all featured apps, I am most interested in the Nextcloud Mail app. The reason is, that not that many cloudron admins will host mail accounts on their cloudron servers and only in this configuration an almost seemless integration into cloudron is possible. All external mail needs to be manually configured in some ways before first use and my experience is, that most users are fine with this. For them it's more important, that the integration itself (after the first setup) is good, an as most users spend their time in nextcloud nowadays, it appears, it's much more natural for them to have the mailclient inside nextcloud as well (although the UI is, IMO, a crime).
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@perler Actually, you can use most of the featured apps without any problem, including Nextcloud Mail app.
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@WiseMetalhead Says who?
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To clarify here, Nextcloud uses the terminology "apps" for what are essentially plugins or extensions in most other apps. We do not recommend plugins in most apps, as too often those break the core application if the programming interfaces for those are not stable and well maintained (which is often a non-trivial programming task) Since upstream developers mostly don't test such plugins (or as nextcloud calls them apps) they break unexpectedly during updates. We from the Cloudron team cannot possibly test all those variations with plugins in all the apps, so we mostly only test the core upstream apps itself.
The "Featured" label in Nextcloud is just some Nextcloud label and may act as some quality indicator from Nextcloud side.
The warning in the docs was also only put there, since based on our experience those often cause downtime and break apps during updates. Of course each and every plugin is of different quality and some are very actively maintained, while others are unmaintained.
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@nebulon ok and thanks for the clarifications. Everything was quite my understanding of the situation and the reason for the feature request. As email is such an important part of an integrated solution, mayby you can support (and test pre-release) the nextcloud mail app as you test the other mailapps integrated into cloudron itself?
Basically make it a "supported cloudron app".
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@perler the current one at least tests the contacts plugin. We are happy to accept improvements for other Nextcloud apps/plugins in that e2e test: https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/nextcloud-app/-/blob/master/test/test.js
Generally though this should really be done upstream, but as far as our experience is, that is not much happening there. Please note that we can't support the apps itself, only the Cloudron as a platform to run these.
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@nebulon ok, I am an admin and wouldn't want to inject my limited hacking skills into your code
- but, as the test just seems to access the nextcloud app URL it would help if you could add ../apps/mail/box/priority as a test to see that nothing crashes and we would risk to roll this out into production (I think as @WiseMetalhead that these featured apps are fairly stable and you don't do too much to the nextcloud code in your repo, do you?) -
@perler correct we hardly ever patch app code as such in our packaging, so if you trust Nextcloud with their featured label, then you should be good to go actually.
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@perler said in support "featured" nextcloud apps:
I think as @WiseMetalhead that these featured apps are fairly stable
In fact, I've been using a fairly large set of apps (Music, Notes, Tasks, Calendar, Forms, etc.) for about a year now, but haven't experienced any problems, including major updates. But it's worth mentioning that all of this is far from a statistic, and maybe I'm just lucky
