Re: Best practices for using GOA

[Debarshi Ray <rishi is lostca se>]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 02:34:24PM +1000, Michael Gratton wrote:
> 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?

As I mentioned in the previous email, the problem is that accounts are
global.  So the question is, if you remove or disable a mail account
from Geary, should it also affect Evolution, and vice versa?

I'd suggest taking it to the designers.

Unlike Evolution or Geary, most (none?) of the designed-from-scratch
GNOME applications don't have their own account configuration UI.  I think
it is worth having a discussion about how to handle GOA integration for
pre-existing applications.

Back when Empathy used to be alive, we explored how to unite
empathy-accounts with Settings -> Online Accounts.  One of the things
we did was to allow applications to call goa_account_set_mail_disabled,
etc. to enable/disable a specific service.  However, none of that led
anywhere because:

(a) Empathy was already dying when the work to integrate chat in GOA
  was taking place.

(b) The whole "accounts are global" aspect was ignored due to
  political reasons.  This was based on the (wrong) thinking, that
  Telepathy was the only usable IM stack, and all chat
  accounts/services would be used by a single application
  (ie. Empathy).  Since the chat account addition/removal UI in GOA
  grew a hard dependency on Telepathy, it made it impossible to
  evangelize GOA integration in anything that wasn't Telepathy.  eg.,
  if you added GOA integration to Pidgin, then Pidgin would grow a
  dependency on Telepathy through GOA's accounts UI.

> 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.

You can do:
$ gnome-control-center online-accounts account_1510070736_9

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

Thanks, but I am also on the list. :)