Re: Online Accounts panel for 3.2

[David Zeuthen <zeuthen gmail com>]

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 10:48 AM, Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com> wrote:
>> 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.

Sure. I mean, GOA won't do the "Generic IMAP + SMTP server" setup (it
could but I'm not so sure it should) so you would always want to keep
such setup around.

> 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.

One thing you can do here, is that if you can't use the OAuth token
(because of the infrastructure issues you mention), you can just ask
the user for the password yourself and maintain it yourself (e.g.
store it in gnome-keyring and update it yourself and so on).

Once you've tweaked your code to use the OAuth token that we provide
(say, in 3.4), you can just switch to that and life should be good.

> But I think just
>   syncing GOA accounts with Evo accounts is still doable by 3.2.

Not so sure what syncing means here? The way I'd like to see this work
is that Evo just listens to what accounts are defined in GOA and
display them if you know how to use them. If you don't know how to use
an account, well, then don't display it. Keep in mind that GOA is
highly dynamic and accounts can come and go at any time.

Does that sound reasoable?

Thanks,
David