Task Proposal: Centralized account management

[todd rme]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 10:45 PM, Ivan Čukić <ivan.cukic at kde.org> wrote:
>> Some services may be able to share authentication.  For instance you
>> may want to use your google authenticatation with google mail, google
>> docs, blogs, etc.  Would there be a single plugin for all of these, or
>
> For me (at least the thing I was planning to do when I thought I'll
> have the time to implement this) it is one plugin with multiple
> capabilities.

But services often allow other services to be used for authentication
(google logins being a prime example, but also facebook and twitter
sometimes).  Further, services come and go over time.  I think having
one plugin with multiple capabilities will become unwieldy as more and
more services get added.

Maybe the solution would be to separate the credentials plugins from
the online authentication plugins, so there can be multiple
authentication plugins connecting to the same credentials.  Plugins
could list which credentials they can use.  When you go to login using
a plugin, it lists all the credentials you currently have that it can
use, as well as offering to let you entire new ones.  This would
require some sort of consistent naming for credentials, but
commonly-used ones like google and facebook should not be a problem in
this regard.

>> there could be something in the web browser that says "it looks like
>> this blog supports google logins, do you want to use your google
>> account here?"
>
> This could be neat, but I don't know whether it would be a safe bet
> that once implemented detection for this would work. Web people don't
> really like API back-compatibility, and especially html footprint b-c
> ;)

Yeah, I was afraid of that.

-Todd