Re: Online Accounts panel for 3.2

[David Zeuthen <zeuthen gmail com>]

Hey,

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 10:52 AM, Alberto Mardegan
<mardy users sourceforge net> wrote:
>> On dependencies: we are trying hard to move away from libdbus-1 and
>> libdbus-glib-1 towards GDBus.
>
> As far as libaccounts is concerned, this can be changed easily -- although I
> don't see a real benefit in moving to a slower implementation...

What do you mean by "slower implementation"?

>> Configuration: I don't think SQLite is at all what we want.
>
> Why not? Is it an unwanted dependency, or do you think that using it is
> overengineering?

I just don't think it's good for storing user configuration.
Especially not on multi-user or managed- systems where it's useful
being able to configure 1000 users by dropping a simple file in /etc.

> If you want to go for the daemon approach, then yes, key-value files are
> just fine. But then you'll have asynchronous APIs, which seems much more
> overhead to me than directly using SQLite.

Not necessarily. My implementation is using the upcoming
org.freedesktop.DBus.ObjectManager so all the async issues basically
go away. See

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/goa-20110427/

for the API. OK, so getting the initial GoaClient object is an async
op (you can do it sync which is fine - it's a local RPC call that is
guaranteed to return very quickly), but from there it's smooth sailing
- you get property changes and so forth for free.

>> I don't think we want any foreign plug-in mechanism (e.g. XML files)
>> to describe services. Instead, we should have a set of abstract base
>> classes that e.g. Google, Facebook, Yahoo etc. backends can extend
>> (and that way share code) and have a GIOExtensionPoint for this. We
>> won't (of course) load 3rd party extensions from the get-go though.
>> Maybe later.
>
> But then, how would a certain application get the title and the icon of the
> GoogleTalk service? Loading a binary plugin?

By

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/goa-20110427/gdbus-org.gnome.OnlineAccounts.Account.html#gdbus-property-org-gnome-OnlineAccounts-Account.Name

In C, this would be

http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/goa-20110427/GoaAccount.html#goa-account-get-name

We could easily add support for getting the icon as well.

Or if you are dealing with a Facebook account, you'd use the Facebook
specific interfaces

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/goa-20110427/gdbus-org.gnome.OnlineAccounts.FacebookAccount.html
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/goa-20110427/GoaFacebookAccount.html

to get information. Again, we can add more stuff as needed.

>> So as mentioned last week, I was already hacking on something along
>> these lines that works this way. I'll try to get it into a shape where
>> it can be shared Real Soon Now(tm).

See http://davidz25.blogspot.com/2011/04/gnome-online-accounts.html -
there's also a video of how the panel.

>
> Good to hear, but why not using something that is already there and offers
> more functionalities than what you propose (with extensions for providers,
> service and service-type descriptions, a mechanism of specifying default
> settings, etc.)?

Because of the concerns I voiced in the last mail.

     David