Re: GNOME Online Accounts 3.34 won't have documents support

[Allan Day <aday gnome org>]

Hi Matthew,

[replying selectively!]

Matthew Paul Thomas via desktop-devel-list <desktop-devel-list gnome org> wrote:
...
> ... gnome-initial-setup is pretty
> much the worst possible time to expect someone to know which accounts,
> if any, are useful to configure. At that point, someone is unlikely to
> know even what apps are preinstalled, let alone which of them they’ll
> want to use, let alone which of them use GOA. ...

Feel free to file an issue about this. I'd be happy to discuss it
there in more detail.

...
> *   As demonstrated by Michael Gratton in this discussion, app vendors
>     can’t rely on GOA including the account type and service type they
>     need in any particular release. This is impractical if they don’t
>     read desktop-devel-list@ frequently, or if their release schedule
>     doesn’t happen to coincide with Gnome’s, or if it doesn’t happen to
>     allow time for suddenly introducing their own account UI because
>     somewhere someone altered a selection of “default apps”.

I think this depends on how widely you imagine Online Accounts being
used: if it's a relatively small number of apps that have a close
relationship with the GNOME project, then keeping people informed and
providing guarantees is feasible. It's only if you imagine wider usage
by 3rd party developers that we don't have a relationship with when it
becomes an issue.

...
> *   For some reason that isn’t clear to me, GOA cares what you use each
>     account for, rather than merely recording which apps the user has
>     granted access to each account.
...

This might well be down to implementation details and I'd be
interested to know how Online Accounts works under the hood, in terms
of turning access on and off.

> From a design perspective I think we've always thought of Online
Accounts as a kind of system-level access rather than per-application
access. For example, the calendar switch affects not just the Calendar
app, but also the calendar provided by gnome-shell.

Allan