Hi Patrick, On 08/30/2010 12:29 PM, Patrick Ohly wrote:
Despite our (brief) discussions around what Accounts&SSO is (and isn't - see http://bugs.meego.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5017), I still have the problem that I haven't used any of the Accounts&SSO APIs and do not fully understand it. Is there now some design document or component overview of Accounts&SSO available?
Unfortunately there aren't any available for public yet. I've been told that they'll be published with the SDK release.
BTW, I've just commented on that feature request you linked above; what you were asking is exactly the point of SSO. :-)
Can you take a step back and explain how "accounts" are created and identified? Not relevant for the suggestion below, but for using Accounts&SSO in general.
Sure. Hopefully I'll have some time to put this information to a wiki, as well as some architecture document; as this is an OS project, waiting for company's milestones doesn't seem correct.
I'll stay on topic with this mail, and only talk about the accounts FW; the SSO part is a bigger beast, but mostly orthogonal to this.
The goal is to have only one account UI for all your accounts; instead of configuring part of your Google account in Thunderbird (for e-mail), Empathy or Pidgin (for IM), F-Spot (for photo/video sharing), etc., we'd like to offer the user the possibility to have all of an account's settings in a single place, divided by sections specific to every service type.
So, we'd have one section with all the settings that are global for the account: username, password (although in practice the password will be stored into the SSO DB, but let's pretend that SSO does not exist and that we are storing the password in the accounts DB), display name, maybe avatar, and a switch to enable/disable the account.
Then, every service provided by the account would add its own settings (if any); for sure there should be a switch to toggle the service on/off, plus any settings that makes sense for the service. For instance, the image sharing section could contain a setting for the maximum image resolution to be used when uploading.
This account UI could be in the control panel of the device, but it could also offer some IPC so that applications could invoke it for configuring a specific service type; for instance, e-mail application could have a menu item "Edit e-mail accounts" which would bring a view of all the accounts providing the e-mail service, and only the e-mail sections of each account could be shown.
That's about the UI. For applications, it means that all account settings are stored in a single DB, and the API provided by libaccounts-{glib,qt} allows them to enumerate the accounts (filtering by enabled accounts, or by service type), and access the settings stored in each section. So, given a google account, the account->selectService(Service("gmail")) method could be used to select the gmail settings and start reading/writing them.
Now I hope that my original e-mail would make more sense. :-) Ciao, Alberto -- http://blog.mardy.it <-- geek in un lingua international! _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
