Re: [Evolution-hackers] Since evolution-alarm-notify asks for passwords

[Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com>]

On Wed, 2011-10-19 at 08:24 +0200, Milan Crha wrote: 
> I cannot find the thread where this was discussed, I'm sorry, but after
> few days I found why this behaviour is pretty bad and why the
> evolution-alarm-notify didn't ask for passwords. My usecase is pretty
> simple, and I believe there are many corporate users with the same
> environment: I have entered few calendars which are accessed only when
> I'm connected to company vpn, unless they fail. When I login I do not
> have the vpn running, thus I'm asked for my passwords, thus I connect to
> vpn and then enter it (it's not prefilled, because it's not a reprompt,
> though maybe some little change on evolution-mapi could be done - these
> are evo-mapi calendars).
> 
> My question is whether there can be done any better way of coping with
> this, because having the password prompts (there are two pilled,
> actually) after each and every login is just a bad experience, from my
> point of view.

(Gesticulating wildly about vaporware...)

One thing I wanted to add after all this account rewrite stuff is done
(maybe for 3.6) is support for VPN state.  My thought was any place in
Evolution where you would enter host and port information there would
also be a check box item with a combo box listing all available VPN
connection names as configured in NetworkManager.

Something like:

   [x] Requires an active VPN connection to [ My Company's VPN |v]

The VPN ID would get stored in the data source's key file.  Then the
backend for that data source would be treated as offline until Network
Manager broadcasts an active VPN connection whose ID matches what you've
selected.  And I believe we're already smart enough to not show password
prompts for offline backends.

I think monitoring NetworkManager (and the other network tools we
support) is going to be another job for the evolution-source-registry
service rather than Evolution, for this very reason you've described.