Re: GNOME Online Accounts extensibility

[David Zeuthen <zeuthen gmail com>]

Hi,

On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 9:05 AM, Ted Gould <ted gould cx> wrote:
> IMHO, the problem with GOA is its lack of extensibility.  So adding
> something like a corporate account type is difficult if not impossible.
> For instance, if was foo corp, and we had internal mail, jabber and
> status.net services -- I'd like to provide one way to provide this
> configuration and have one place for users to set up their accounts.  I
> think handling this use case could provide some guidance for where GOA
> could go in making users who are corporate environments lives easier.

If you examine the GOA project and its git log, we actually did use to
read config files from /etc/goa-1/config.f and
~/.config/goa-1.0/config.d (or something similar to that). But I
ripped this out as I didn't want to commit to a config file format for
3.2. Why? Because it's never smart to paint yourself into a corner for
new stuff. But no-one says we can't do it for 3.4 or 3.6 or whatever.

In particular, having

 1. a stable config file format; and
 2. .d directories in /etc and $HOME; and
 3. something $USER expansion in config files

combined with the idea of supporting generic IMAP/SMTP/XMPP/Caldav
configurations, see

 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=661117

that Patryk filed on my request... then... then GOA can be pretty nice
from a corporate point of view. Because with that the you'd just drop
a single config file in /etc/goa-1/config.d/mail.conf specifying the
$USER company com for email, something else for XMPP and so on.

But please note: all this has absolutely nothing to do with Ken's rant.

   David