Re: Online Accounts panel for 3.2

[Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com>]

On Mon, 2011-05-02 at 09:14 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote: 
> Right - I think it's fine to have GOA as an optional dependency of
> Evolution. Realistically, I think most distros are going to build it
> with GOA support so it will probably pull in libgoa-1.0.so - but the
> dependency on the packages containing goa-daemon(8) could be optional.
> Or the app could speak D-Bus directly if it wants.

That sounds good.


> Basically, GOA is designed so the app won't need to worry about any of
> this - the app can simply get the credentials from GOA and do its
> thing. And if the credential doesn't work (suppose the user revoked
> access [1]), then the app doesn't need to do much because GOA will
> already have notified the user (through a notification and a red error
> icon in the control panel) and whenever the user takes action to
> rectify the problem, the app will get notified by a D-Bus signal.

Two points:

1) If GOA is an optional dependency for Evolution then we can't rely
   on it too heavily for authentication.  We still need to be able to
   authenticate GMail accounts in the absence of GOA.

2) Evolution is currently entirely password based and knows nothing of
   authentication tokens.  If we have to use authentication tokens for 
   certain select accounts, that will require some deep infrastructure
   redesign, which from experience tends to take several months.  So I
   don't see the token integration happening by 3.2.  But I think just
   syncing GOA accounts with Evo accounts is still doable by 3.2.