Re: Prompting for passwords on the desktop?

["Steve Frécinaux" <nudrema gmail com>]

2008/9/18 Josselin Mouette <joss debian org>:
> One way to avoid annoying the user is to establish a line like "a
> password prompt should only pop up immediately after a user action".
> This way it appears only while you are expecting to type a password.
>
> Good behavior: you click on "send mail" in evolution, and it immediately
> prompts the GPG passphrase.
>
> Bad behavior: still in evolution, when an IMAP server stops responding,
> a pop up comes out of nowhere and asks for your password, whatever you
> were doing at that moment.
>
> Moderately bad behavior: you connect to a slow remote server in
> nautilus, and 10 seconds later it asks for a password.
>
> Of course, it looks very hard to find correct ways to implement password
> prompts without having them popping up at unexpected times, but that's
> at least what we should try to achieve.

We could have such a behaviour:

- if the application requesting the password is focused, then show the
modal dialog directly.
- if not, then have an icon in the notification area or something like that.