If I may add my two cents, I hope noone minds.
If the Nextcloud company would spend less time coming up with new features to market in the next version of Nextcloud, and more time making sure that existing features work well, and also to look more at improving what we already have, then I think things would be better. In particular when a lot of the new features are sometimes just left without much maintenance and evolution once they have lost their initial marketing value.
There are so many bugs and issues that need fixing, and other types of maintenance, that there is currently a very misbalanced spending of time between new fancy marketing fluff and making the current stuff rock solid and working well. I’m sure I don’t have to pinpoint particular issues etc, as this is an ongoing situation since years. That said, it’s fine to disagree, in case someone would want to do that.
More issues and PRs could then be attended in a reasonable time (this is truly a problem today, there’s endless examples of this), and important things like what @pulsejet is querying about here can be evaluated to a larger extent. I’m not saying Nextcloud should rewrite the core to make it event driven, but I’m not sure that the thought has really been evaluated enough. Look at it from this perspective; If this is never done, then where will this leave Nextcloud in some years time? Efforts of this type now are not meant as a short term gain, it’s for a longer term purpose and perspective.
So, what I mean is simply; If someone who seems very knowledgable in regards to what they bring up and discuss suggests something that might have a long-term benefit for Nextcloud, then let’s not be afraid of how it may affect the core. Take the opportunity to spend less time on one of the fancy next marketing features and instead seriously consider what would actually be needed to make something like this work, and whether the gain of it is relevant. I haven’t been involved in the discussions, but it doesn’t come across as if this type of change has been truly looked into closely.
That said, there are of course other aspects such as depending on additional third party software, what’s needed to install to run Nextcloud, and so on. That’s part of what needs to be considered.
Some comments:
More senior colleagues wrote that it might seem doable on first sight but that everyone who ever tried to rework the core architecture bumped into lots of issues because there are a lot of hidden quirks and hacks.
This is arguably a sign that the core of Nextcloud has to be improved. Also worth noting is that whatever means that were looked at earlier to do this, might be very different from the means involved in the suggestion by @pulsejet. It might be possible to do in a much more controlled and less intrusive way now, than before. Or not.
It’s never straightforward. So for now my assumption is that this plan is not realistic.
I really am not in position to say how much of the current development efforts are put into improving the current core and related parts of Nextcloud, but as I mentioned above, at some point there will be a need for improvement, and if all the years nothing was done on that part (e.g. because of fear of breaking things), then in the end we’ll have a stale or outdated product. At that point a total rewrite might be more fruitful, but that is arguably a much bigger endeavor than what is being suggested in this thread.
All that said, let’s all be friends. Oh, and yeah I agree, @pulsejet - take the offer of a 1:1 discussion about this! I’m sure it would be both nice and fruitful, it might get everyone much more on the same page than through a forum like this. Please.
. At times I see strange stuff like very old deprecated APIs still being used in the core itself (without any apparent reason), which makes me question either why they were deprecated or whether the core gets much maintenance at all. Of course there might be a good reason I’m unaware about, but maybe now I expect a similar lack of response if I ask.