Re: GNOME 3 external dependency proposal (accounts service)

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le mardi 12 octobre 2010 à 19:17 +0100, Bastien Nocera a écrit :
> 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.
With my (infanticidal ;-) gnome-system-tools maintainer hat on, I'd just
like to note that I think the way forward is to use accounts-dialog and
accounts service instead of users-admin and the system-tools-backends.
They allow for a better integration with the desktop, e.g. by
configuring preferred locale and e-mail address; the
system-tools-backends don't really allow us to do this because of their
too generic model.

We still need to do something about the two features that
accounts-dialog is missing compared to users-admin (password-less login
and encrypted home directory). But that's definitely +1 for me too,
since using a single backend and frontend in all distributions will be
of high benefit.


Regards