Re: Best practices for using GOA

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Fri, 2018-06-22 at 15:27 +0000, Debarshi Ray wrote:
>
<snip>
> That part of the documentation was written by David Zeuthen in the
> very early days of gnome-online-accounts.  The idea was to not remove
> account specific caches and data from applications due to an (online)
> update.
>
> (In theory, one might want to restart goa-daemon after an update, and
> that leads to GoaClient::account-removed being emitted.)
>
> Fast forward to 2018, we don't recommend online updates anymore.  On
> traditional package-based systems one is supposed to use systemd's
> system-update.target, while OSTree-based systems require you to
> reboot
> into the new image.  Either way, there's no need to restart a running
> goa-daemon.
>
> That leaves the case where you might be hacking on GOA and need to
> keep restarting goa-daemon.
>
> 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?

The problem here, unless I am mistaken, is that the API for
applications that consumes those accounts makes no difference between
an account disappearing because it was removed, and the object
disappearing from the ObjectManager because the whole daemon went away,
you receive an "object-removed" signal in both cases.

With a bit more work on the GOA client library, that difference could
be made, and the account wouldn't be removed by end-user apps in the
case of the goa-daemon going away (just disabled, and data kept), and
the data removed only when the account is actually removed as a user
action.