Re: gnome-keyring API Migration

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel kamstrup gmail com>]

2009/8/12 Stef Walter <stef-list memberwebs com>:
> As posted here previously, KDE and GNOME developers are working together
> on a new DBus based API for storing secrets [1].
>
> I'm working hard to implement this new API in gnome-keyring, while we're
> finalizing it. It contains many beneficial changes, and lessons learned.
> You can join in on the discussion on the XDG mailing list [2].
>
> It's very likely that there will be a new client side library which
> wraps this DBus API.
>
> The current libgnome-keyring.so will be probably be replaced by
> compatibility shims. These shims would be distributed separately from
> the gnome-keyring distribution. This library would eventually be deprecated.
>
> The current (undocumented, unstable, private) binary protocol that
> gnome-keyring-daemon and libgnome-keyring speak to each other will go
> away. It's grown crufty and hard to extend. The DBus based secrets API
> is the future.
>
> Migration Effort:
>
>  * Most normal applications using libgnome-keyring will have almost
>   no immediate migration needed, due to the compatibility shims.
>  * Module packagers may need to update dependencies.
>  * Patches will be contributed to seahorse, gnome-session,
>   gnome-power-manager and any others that interact with gnome-keyring
>   in unique ways.
>  * Parts of java-gnome and gnome-sharp and any others who talk to
>   gnome-keyring using the unsupported private binary protocol
>   will need to be rewritten by their developers.
>
> We're working hard to finish all this by 2.30 (ie: 3.0), but that's
> pretty soon. It'd be awesome if 2.30 was a 9 month cycle.

Sweet this all sounds great. Looking through the specs it looks like
top notch work - the only gotcha I found was the DBus path naming
which should be all lower case according to the DBus naming
conventions: http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-specification.html#naming-conventions.

So /org/freedesktop/Secrets -> /org/freedesktop/secrets

 - but somebody stop my painting this bikeshed! ;-)

-- 
Cheers,
Mikkel