(Hopping on to desktop-devel@ to follow up to this) Jeremy Bicha wrote on 23/01/2019 8:21 pm: >… > A few months ago, I talked with mpt about GNOME Online Accounts being > added to Ubuntu's version of gnome-initial-setup. I believe his > opinion was that the app itself should offer the "add a new account" > feature instead of the Initial Setup or Settings apps. >…
Yes. This was for two main reasons. First, 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. For example, even if someone knew that Firefox is preinstalled, and knew in advance that they wanted to use Firefox rather than Chrome or Opera or another browser, and knew that Firefox integrates with Pocket, so they set up a Pocket GOA account from gnome-initial-setup … Even if all those stars aligned, eventually they’d discover that g-i-s had wasted their time, because Firefox doesn’t integrate with GOA. The second reason is more relevant to this discussion: It’s not sensible for any app to be beholden to GOA for its account setup in the first place. This in turn has many factors: * Many of the apps, that Gnome users spend their time using, also run in other environments where GOA doesn’t exist. So the developer has to do their own account UI for those platforms anyway. * 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”. * 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. Why was there such a thing as “Documents support” in GOA in the first place? This suggests that if Facebook or Google or Microsoft announced and released a new chat app XYZ tomorrow, which integrated with their usual account system, it couldn’t use your Facebook or Google or Microsoft account stored in GOA, because GOA wouldn’t include “XYZ support”. * Even if GOA does contain both the account and the toggle relevant to a particular app, the app may have settings that are account-specific, but which GOA does not include (for example, “which folder should sent messages be filed in” or “which words should be muted in this timeline”). In those cases the app needs per-account settings UI anyway, resulting in a weird bifurcation. * The combination of those reasons, plus all those apps that use accounts of types that GOA doesn’t provide in the first place, reinforces a mental model where GOA is generally not where people expect to find account UI. None of that is to say that GOA shouldn’t exist. It has the potential to save people time. “I set up an account in App A. Now it will be quicker to use the same account in App B.” Anything more than that is noise. Cheers -- mpt _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list