Re: Online Accounts panel for 3.2

[Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com>]

On Wed, 2011-04-27 at 09:18 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote: 
> First, I think this is such an important area for GNOME that we want
> to be in control of our own destiny - e.g. I don't think the problem
> space is well-enough understood that we want to commit to stable APIs
> or sharing code with others. Not yet. Maybe when all this is better
> understood we can start moving things to freedesktop.org and sharing
> interfaces with e.g. KDE, Qt or whatever. But I really don't think
> that we are there yet (we've seen with e.g. org.fd.Notifications what
> mess it can be if you standardize early).

I agree, but for the the time being I view GOA integration as an
optional add-on enhancement for Evolution, similar to how we use
NetworkManager.

We have a lot of users that run other desktops and I'd like to keep Evo
fully functional in the absence of an OnlineAccounts service, and thus
avoid any hard dependencies.

Is that inline with what you had intended for this service: as something
for applications to opt into?  Thunderbird, for example, could opt in
with their own GOA add-on just as easily as Evolution.


> On dependencies: we are trying hard to move away from libdbus-1 and
> libdbus-glib-1 towards GDBus. We also don't want any deps (run-time or
> otherwise) on Qt or e.g. cryptsetup or dm-luks. We also really should
> be using the platform keyring API (e.g. gnome-keyring) whenever
> possible.

How and when will you be using gnome-keyring (or I guess technically the
"org.freedesktop.secrets" service)?  What kind of meta-data schema will
the keyring entries use, so that E-D-S might find and reuse them?

Otherwise, the D-Bus API you proposed sounds pretty easy to wire up to
what we have (or will have), if I'm understanding all this correctly.
I'm happy with what I've seen so far.

Matthew Barnes