Re: Best practices for using GOA

[Michael Gratton <mike vee net>]

Hey Rishi,

Thanks for going into that much detail!

On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 1:27 AM, Debarshi Ray <"rishi.is"@lostca.se> 
wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 10:43:07AM +1000, Michael Gratton wrote:
> >  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?
[snip: reasons]
> Maybe a more reasonable suggestion for applications would be to wait
> for a certain interval of time before dropping account-specific caches
> and data?  What do you think?

At the moment, I'm thinking of simply removing the accounts from the UI 
and backend, then deleting them from disk in the background next time 
the application starts, which should be fine in most cases, although 
still a bit racy maybe?

I was thinking an explicit signal would be better though. E.g. 
something like GoaClient::account-deleted that is fired when a user has 
explicitly deleted the account and closed the GOA panel. Geary uses 
exactly this distinction internally to differentiate between the 
backend closing accounts on app shutdown and accounts being removed by 
the user, and it works well.

> > 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.
[snip]
> In the past, you could do:
> $ gnome-control-center online-accounts add google ...
>
> We had added it for an ad-hoc, experimental feature that was neither
> designed nor finished, and never used.  Recently, it led to a
> complication by triggering a WebKitGTK+, so we ended up removing it.
> See: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=789469
>
> Maybe bring it up with the GNOME designers and we can revisit it?  It
> would be good to have a proper plan before writing any code.

Yeah, something like that command line invocation was what I had in 
mind, although it would be better if it was a DBus call, IMHO.

Okay, I'll take it over to the designers.

On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 1:52 AM, Debarshi Ray <"rishi.is"@lostca.se> 
wrote:
> 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?

There's maybe a use case there since some people might want to use Evo 
for e.g. the Exchange integration or groupware features for their work 
account, while keep Geary for their personal GMail account, but maybe 
that's overthinking it.

> I'd suggest taking it to the designers.

Yup, will do, but to be honest I'm happy to just launch the GOA CC 
panel for the account.

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

Good to know, thanks!

Is there any chance of adding a DBus API for this? I imagine the GOA 
daemon would end up implementing the same thing that Geary would in 
terms of exec'ing gnome-control-center, but it means that in the 
future, any changes in the way this is invoked could be coordinated 
between only those two modules, rather than also having to update any 
apps that integrate with GOA in this way.

//Mike

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