Re: GNOME Online Accounts extensibility

[David Zeuthen <zeuthen gmail com>]

Hi,

On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 3:05 PM, Patryk Zawadzki <patrys pld-linux org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 7:40 PM, David Zeuthen <zeuthen gmail com> wrote:
>> I.  Adding support for a provider P, currently means making code-changes to
>>    all of the GNOME apps using its services.. because most of the time standard
>>    standardized protocols are not in use. For the few cases where it
>> uses a standard
>>    protocol (such as XMPP and IMAP/SMTP) we could support pluggable providers.
>>
>>    For example, we could, presumably, read "plug-in" files from some directory
>>    so we could list 200 different XMPP chat services or 200 different
>> IMAP servers.
>>    That that no-one ever heard about. But would we want the user to
>> see this? The
>>    answer is: not in GOA.
>
> Can't we just have an option that says "Other Jabber/XMPP provider"
> and allows me to enter my JID, the server name, password, port etc.?
> It would cover most of people's needs even if they need to ask the
> provider for details (that they have to provide anyway). Most
> importantly it would mean not using two configuration windows, one of
> which not showing anything other than Google and the other saying that
> some accounts "could not be configured here". The current state of
> affairs leads to confusion (I had to explain that to a live person, I
> failed because I did not have any sensible arguments).
>
> Same could probably be done for IMAP/POP3/SMTP.

And also for calendar since there's a couple of standardized
protocols. FWIW, I don't think it's a bad idea and I actually did
something like this early on, see

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gen-mail-1.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gen-mail-2.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gen-mail-3.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gen-mail-4.png

but IIRC the designers had some objections and I ended up running out
of time. I'll try to grab the designers again. Would you mind filing a
bug about it? Thanks!

    David