Re: Best practices for using GOA

[Michael Gratton <mike vee net>]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 10:43 AM, Michael Gratton <mike vee net> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I'm in the process of adding support GOA into Geary and have a few 
> questions about this.
>
> At the moment, Geary will automatically add and connect a local 
> account for each GOA account with a mail service, so that these show 
> up automatically. When a GOA mail service is disabled (e.g. for 
> Google, outlook.com, etc) or removed, Geary will disable the account. 
> This seems to work pretty well, but there's two cases I'm not sure 
> about:
>
> The GOA docs say that when "account-removed" is fired, clients should 
> not delete any data, but then when is it actually appropriate to do 
> so? Geary can accumulate gigbytes of data for an account, so relying 
> on manual intervention to remove an account when none was required to 
> create it seems counter-intuitative. There's no "account-deleted" 
> signal that I can see.
>
> Secondly, when users go to add a new account to Geary and it's either 
> a Google or outlook.com account, I'd like to direct them to add a GOA 
> account instead so they get their contacts sync'ed as well. I was 
> thinking of a UX flow something like:
>
> 1. Collect name, email address (or just explicitly prompt to select a 
> service provider)
> 2. If a supported GOA provider is indicated, launch GOA CC panel to 
> add that type
> 3. Else keep collecting custom server details
>
> In (2), I'd like the GOA CC panel dialog to appear, prompt for 
> credentials, then disappear when setup is complete. By this time 
> Geary would have added the account in the background and user can 
> just get going.
>
> Is there a way of doing this? The Manager.AddAccount() method seems 
> to be aimed at backends, since it requires internal IDs and 
> credentials, and there doesn't seem to a command-line option I can 
> use to do anything except launch the GOA CC without indicating it 
> should add an account for a specific provider.

Actually, one other question, related to both:

Should Geary allow users to remove GOA-backed accounts from within 
Geary? If so, doing so would also mean mean removing the account from 
GOA, right? So in that case, for accounts with multiple services, does 
that mean disabling the mail service or deleting the complete account?

If Geary shouldn't allow this then again it would be good to provide a 
way to launch the GOA CC panel and open details for the specific 
account, to let the user manage it there.

//Mike

[Also CC'ing  Debarshi in case he's not on the list]

--
⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>