Re: GNOME 3 external dependency proposal (accounts service)

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 14:07 -0400, Ray Strode wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> Right now gnome-shell uses a cut-and-paste version of some code from
> GDM for showing its user switch applet (and also its login dialog).
> That code isn't very GDM specific, and really belongs in a library. At
> this point, it's basically a thin caching layer around the accounts
> service and consolekit dbus apis on freedesktop.org with some fallback
> code for when the accounts service isn't available.  So I think it
> probably makes sense to have that code in the accounts service module.
> 
> I've done that today here:
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/accountsservice/commit/?id=8c031bce3f6fe67bd5f0f782a457aebd6af0ceba
> 
> Vincent and Jon McCann talked recently about moving the user switch
> applet to the gnome-panel.  This is in the vein of matching the gnome
> 2 fallback experience with the default gnome 3 experience for 3.0.
> That means the panel will too need to depend on this same bit of code,
> in the near future.
> 
> Also, there's been some discussion on IRC and elsewhere about putting
> the accounts dialog in control-center.
> 
> These three things together mean we really need an external dependency
> on accounts service, I think.  The accounts service is a small module
> Matthias wrote for enumerating the users on a system and storing some
> metadata (well mainly just the face icon right now) outside of the
> users home directory, so it's available by other users and before the
> user is logged in.  I agreed to help him comaintain it a few days ago.

+1

The users panel will be very useful in adding some long sought after
basic GDM configuration, as well as replacing the horror that was
gnome-about-me.

Cheers