ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2014-08-30 at 22:51 +0200, Michał Sawicz wrote:

> Another approach I was thinking of is allowing multiple plugins of the 
> same account type exist (so every app would ship their own copy) and 
> deduplicating based on type and compatibility version. This has some 
> technical difficulties like allowing multiple packages of potentially 
> different compatibility versions to co-exist (you'd have two accounts of 
> the same type in that case, again not a great user experience, but 
> should be rare). We'd also need a place to share the account plugins, or 
> at least their interfaces so that different implementations can talk the 
> same language. This could potentially have security implications if not 
> done right. The more I think of this way the more it feels like 
> overengineering for a quite rare a problem.


I think that we do need to allow apps to all ship their own version, but
I think trying to maintain a compatibility version would be nearly
impossible. It only works if there's a single repo that determines those
versions, which we can't really ensure would exist.

I think what does make sense is creating a hash of the configuration, if
the configuration matches the hash of the other one we present it as one
account type and on login. If they don't match, then you have two.
Something like:

  Foo Account (Foo App)
  Foo Account (Bar App)

Ideally that wouldn't happen often, and not for long, but it would
provide a useful degradation case for the situation.

Ted