Re: [Weekly report] Week 5: Conduit

[Adam Schreiber <sadam gnome org>]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 4:18 AM, Alexandre<airmind gmail com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 00:31, John Stowers <john stowers gmail com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 2:10 PM, Alexandre <airmind gmail com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I had my last exam friday, I still have some things to deliver but I had
>>> some time to hack on Conduit this weekend.
>>>
>>> Basically I hacked on the login centralization on Conduit. This is
>>> important because users dont want to type their username and passwords all
>>> the time, so this brings on place to add accounts to Conduit. What I did was
>>> to create a factory that handles listing accounts and creating dataproviders
>>> for them. My initial test with the Google and Flickr dataproviders worked,
>>> but there is still much to do. My feeling is that technically, this is quite
>>> simple, but I still dont know the best way to present it to the user.
>>> Right now I have some alternatives: keep the dataproviders as is and let
>>> the user choose an account when it adds the dataprovider to the Canvas, or
>>> create categories or new dataproviders for each new account, similar to how
>>> devices are shown, so the user chooses which account to use by dragging that
>>> account to the Canvas. The former is how this is being implemented, for no
>>> real reason.
>>> This work is especially important for my project, because imagine the
>>> user trying to upload his image in Eye of Gnome to his Flickr account, the
>>> last thing he wants to do is authenticate with Flickr all the time.
>>
>> That sounds great. How is the data stored behind the scenes, in
>> gnome-keyring or somewhere else?
>
> Using Gconf (/apps/condut/Accounts/module_name/account_name if I'm not
> mistaken, similar to how I'm trying to keep a list of persistent SyncSets in
> /apps/conduit/SyncSets/syncset_name, so we could refactor the code later
> on).
> Gconf lets me watch for changes, so my idea of implementing a GUI (which
> doesnt exist yet) is simply changing the GConf values, so both the GUI and
> the AccountManager I created see the changes. A pure-Python implementation
> would be very simple, I could use GObject signals for changes.
> But of course, the real place to store these are in the keyring, so I'll
> look in to how to access it this week. Shouldnt be very hard.

It would be great if the conduit, evolution, empathy/telepathy, and
epiphany developers could get together and build some concept of an
account metadata file/store with the passwords stored once in
gnome-keyring.  Right now, my Google password is stored 3 different
times in the keyring, twice for IMAP and SMTP and a third for jabber.
Conduit would then add it twice more for picasa and calendars.
There's a similar issue with Yahoo for flickr and YIM.

Cheers,

Adam