Re: GNOME Online Accounts extensibility

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 07/10/11 15:21, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 9:05 AM, Ted Gould<ted gould cx>  wrote:
>
> > IMHO, the problem with GOA is its lack of extensibility.  So adding
> > something like a corporate account type is difficult if not impossible.
> > For instance, if was foo corp, and we had internal mail, jabber and
> > status.net services -- I'd like to provide one way to provide this
> > configuration and have one place for users to set up their accounts.
>
> Care to elaborate ? Why would it be difficult or impossible ?
> Extensibility was very much on the agenda when GOA was designed.
>
> But GOA is not a 'generic account setup' dialog to allow all the
> worlds apps to drop their own account setup dialogs. If that is what
> you are looking for, you will be disappointed. It is the central place
> to set up accounts that are integrated in GNOME apps. If third-party
> apps can use the same account information, that is great. But we don't
> want to crowd the provider list with providers that are not integrated
> at least in some GNOME apps.
> And we don't want to add switches for services that are not covered by
> GNOME apps.

I think it makes sense for the dialog to be a broker on behalf of _ALL_ 
apps using that information and the user who has it. Of course it 
doesn't make sense to display account set up information for service Foo 
if no application can make use of it. So I would suggest the need to 
register "clients" to make sure configurations are listed *when* it 
makes sense.

I must admit, when I saw the "Online Accounts" entry in the menu, I was 
excited at the prospect that finally the Telepathy mission-control or 
accounts dialog had been integrated into GNOME properly.

From other comments in this thread, I also realise that it's not just 
about IM communications but also clouds as some are expecting.

--
Regards,
Martyn

Founder and CEO of Lanedo GmbH.