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contacts: Deprecate the entire Contacts API as Google is ending it

Philip Withnall requested to merge pwithnall/libgdata:42-deprecate-contacts into master

The Contacts API server will return error responses with increasing frequency until all responses are errors in December 2021.

https://developers.google.com/contacts/v3/announcement

They are replacing it with the People API (why can’t they provide backwards-compatibility?), but I don’t have the time to port the libgdata Contacts service to the new People API. More crucially, I don’t have time to maintain such a port in the future.

https://developers.google.com/people

Handily, the CardDAV API for accessing contact data is still explicitly supported by Google Contacts, so people should use that instead. At least it’s a standard protocol, with a variety of conformant implementations already released and maintained; and not just another here-today-gone-tomorrow Google REST API.

https://developers.google.com/people/carddav

Using CardDAV requires OAuth 2 authorization, just like the Contacts API did.

So, bearing all the above in mind, the libgdata Contacts service is now deprecated in favour of using CardDAV.

Signed-off-by: Philip Withnall pwithnall@endlessos.org

Fixes: #42 (closed)

Closes #42 (closed)

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