Re: Prompting for passwords on the desktop?

[Dave Neary <bolsh gnome org>]

Hi,

Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le lundi 22 septembre 2008 à 11:54 +0200, Steve Frécinaux a écrit :
>> 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.
> 
> That’s certainly a good start, but it is not enough. For example if you
> are writing an email in evolution and it suddenly asks for a password
> while reconnecting, it is quite annoying.
> 
> I really think the good criterion is not “has focus” but some “action
> triggered by the user less than 1 second ago”. 

That seems like it'll be overly complicating any code that gets written
to handle this. Occam's razor and all that... Getting asked for a
password when writing email is annoying (it's one of my least favourite
things about Thunderbird when I'm using it off-line) but the solution is
to figure out why you're authenticating in the mail programme at the
wrong time and suppress that auth request, rather than complicate the
code path for what should be a system service.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
bolsh gnome org