Re: Proposed: gnome-keyring-manager

[Fernando Herrera <fherrera onirica com>]

Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 05:19:24PM -0400, Seth Nickell escribió:

>I can see it there, but I don't want it there. Every time we add a
>feature like this, if we add a corresponding entry in the apps menu we
>end up with chaos.
>
>In general my feeling is that everything *could* theoretically be fixed
>for the release but my gut instinct is the same as jdub, it might make
>sense to wait another release for this.

	I can not understand why a 6 month delay would help on this. I
mean, people have recognized the GNOME needs an application to manage
keyrings, but we have a problem: we don't know where to put it. Well,
without concrete proposals we won't neither know where to put it in 6
months. Possible options:

	* Put a standard GNOME app entry on the System Menu,
	* Put an button on the auth login dialog to manage.
	  keyrings/password (the libgnomeui dialog):
		http://www.gnome.org/~fherrera/img/auth-manage.png
	* Add a "Passwords" entry to the Desktop Preferences.
	* Your best proposal here.

		So please, instead of saying "I don't want it there, so
let's wait to the next release", please make some UI sugesstions about
how to solve the problem (we are in the exact period for that, features
are finished, UI is going to be frozen).

	Summarizing the other contras of g-k-m inclussion:

	* Shaun McCance pointed the lack of documentation:
		Well, we are really worried about this, but I think we
can come up with some good docs from the same people who showed its
interest during the gnome-keyring-manager development.

	* Jeff Waugh was worried about that g-k-m is very difficult to
	  understand and proposed more design work.

		I know that the keyring concept it's a bit hard to
understand. I realized that it was hard for developers and wrote a doc
explaning it, so we can assume that it's really hard for end users. The
problem here is that we _have_ keyrings on the desktop. gnome-keyring
was accepted on GNOME 2.6 Desktop release [1] and with it, the
libgnomeui auth dialogs that talks about keyrings, sessions and so. So
the user will see and use keyrings. Maybe the solution for this
(gnome-keyring included module problem) is to add some cool
documentation for the end-user explaning whats it a keyring and how does
it work. We can just put this on the user guide and add a button to the
auth dialog [2].
	About more design work, gnome-keyring-manager functionality and
user case is very similar to Apple OS X keychain manager:

	a) Bob wants to see his stored items.
	b) Bob wants to remove one of his items because doesn't trust
	   his computer 
	c) Bob uses to log into widget.gnome.org and has an ssh password
	   that he doesn't remember anyome (because has been using
	   gnome-keyring for ages). But after Alice attacked
	   widget.gnome.org, he need to use his same account for the new
	   fancy machine master.gnome.org, so he need to change the
	   hostname for his password
	d) Bob has been using this new P2P software using a wonderful
	   GNOME application, but he has discovered a new Java
	   application that gets his p0rn faster, so he need to get
	   login and password of his old account and paste them into
	   the new application.

	For these normal user case this will be the interation:
	a) Open g-k-m and scroll
	b) Open g-k-m, scroll, and press delete
	c) Open g-k-m, scroll, click and edit hostname (with the new
	   mariano patch moving attributes editing from the advanced
	   dialog into the main one)
	d) Open g-k-m, scroll, Drag the secret image into the java
	   application (if it is X-DnD compliant) or open the secret
	   expander

		So all the standard cases are covered on the main
window. For advanced users doing fancy stuff, there are Advanced button
and manage different keyrings window.

	So please, instead of saying that g-k-m (from my point of view,
g-k, that is included) is difficult and propose an indeterminated delay, make 
some more sugestions to solve the problems we currently have on the
Desktop about keyring and the problems for including g-k-m (something
like "Our usability guys said that the 'wallet' term KDE is using is
better than our 'keyring', so please change it on all visible strings.
Also change 'item' for password+secret).

Salu2
	
-- 
Fernando Herrera de las Heras
Onírica: análisis, diseño e implantación de soluciones informáticas
http://www.onirica.com