elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

[Сергей <shnatsel@xxxxxxxxx>]

Fabian and me did a bit of digging on GNOME Online Accounts and they turned
out to be rather disappointing. It uses OAuth - authentication method meant
for web apps. So you can't just enter username and password in Switchboard
once and for all - you must have internet connection, click a button that
opens a specific web page, and enter your credentials there. And that
doesn't store your username and password, so e.g. if you have a Google
account authenticated in GOA, you'll have to re-enter your credentials in
any app that requires username/password - and most apps do (Postler,
Empathy, etc etc etc). Well, Google provides experimental OAuth-based email
access, but they're the only ones to do that. Nobody uses OAuth for XMPP or
other chat protocols yet.

Also, there's a huge legal mess with API keys stored in the open. What's
worse, there are API usage limits for half of GOA services. Looks like
GNOME managed to negotiate more or less unlimited usage for their API keys,
but we're not as huge as GNOME...

There are also some extensibility and modularity concerns about GOA brought
up in GNOME mailing list, but I'm not in a position to discuss this aspect.

--
shnatsel