Re: GNOME online desktop - (some of the possible) next steps

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Havoc Pennington">
>
> >   - modify mugshot.org/applications (to become
> >     online.gnome.org/applications) to support web apps
>
> >   - make online.gnome.org and mugshot.org work as OpenID providers
>
> Quick Q about these so I have my facts straight: Do you intend for mugshot
> to be a branded 'frontend' to online.gnome.org? Which data will be stored on
> either side? Or will the users and data be separate and/or federated?

There is probably a short and a long term answer.

Right now what we're doing is just adding more jsps to mugshot.org that 
will be served when the server is reached from online.gnome.org. These 
jsps will not have the Stacker, just an "edit my account" page and a 
"login/signup" page. They will have GNOME branding instead of Mugshot.
Bryan is making mockups.

The backing database is still the same, so an account on 
online.gnome.org is the same as one on mugshot.org and the data is in 
one big soup.

What this gives us is online.gnome.org by the end of the week or so and 
BigBoard etc. can start to be powered by online.gnome.org.

Longer term we can split things up more fundamentally. The idea is that 
Mugshot is the "stacker"/"watch what's happening online" site and will 
be parallel to / on similar footing with other third party web sites we 
integrate with.

online.gnome.org will have /applications, storage for user settings, 
your avatar/name, and other important desktop backend features.

Basically online.gnome.org will be required for online desktop (but not 
for GNOME, if you just stick to "classic desktop mode"), while 
mugshot.org will be the stacker app and you only use it if you want the 
stacker feature. But mugshot.org isn't "core" in any way, it's just 
another web site we integrate with - though an open source one.

It isn't 100% clear yet how the details work out but that's the general 
idea that makes sense to me.

The long-term location of the servers isn't clear yet, and we'll 
probably also want to make the servers a test case for a shiny new Free 
Terms of Service / Open Service Definition that isn't defined yet.

The two items you quoted from my post, in more detail, are:

 - right now we "package" some web apps like GMail in the
   online-desktop module, adding .desktop files and MIME handlers
   and so forth, but we don't track these web apps on
   mugshot.org/applications. So we should track them, probably based on
   browser title (but never sending the browser title to the server)

 - there are Java libraries for OpenID; we should make your profile page
   on both mugshot.org and online.gnome.org act as an OpenID provider,
   so people can use these for OpenID if they want. Also, this would
   let us federate with something like the abicollab site, potentially,
   *waves hands wildly*

Havoc