Add support for Persona on KDE sites?

[Ben Cooksley]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 3:46 PM, Nicolás Alvarez
<nicolas.alvarez at gmail.com> wrote:
> El 27/09/2012, a las 22:44, Mark <markg85 at gmail.com> escribió:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> -- i'm not sure where to send this mail to.. code-devel seems out of
>> place but i can't find anything more fitting for this question.. there
>> is no "websites" list --
>>
>> Yesterday mozilla introduced Persona (used to be BrowserID). More
>> information about that can be found here https://www.persona.org/. At
>> first i was - like probably quite a few others - sceptical about
>> another single sign-on system. I mean, we have openid already and it
>> does seem to work fine now that it's finally populair. However, i
>> personally now see persona as it's successor. It's so extremely easy
>> to use it.
>>
>> Assumption: you are logged in with persona
>> Logging in on a persona enabled site is very very easy and extremely
>> user friendly. You get a popup which asks if you want to login or not.
>> If you want you simply push the sign in button and you're in! You
>> don't need to type in anything just to login.
>>
>> Needless to say, i'm very positive about this :)
>>
>> Why don't we add persona support on the KDE sites?
>> What would be needed for that to happen? Considering that OpenID is
>> already in place, adding persona must be very easy to add.
>
>
> OpenID is 'already in place' for only a few sites, such as the wikis. Taking
> the wikis as an example, we support OpenID only because MediaWiki already
> had the code for it. KDE people didn't do any work to add OpenID support. So
> if you want Persona support on the wikis, I guess you should ask the
> Mediawiki developers first.

Further, in many cases the support for OpenID by these sites has
created a indefinite maintenance burden, as the OpenID implementations
usually do not store sufficient details to allow later recovery of
access to these accounts when OpenID access is unavailable.

>
> But wikis are just one example. Most of the KDE sites already support
> unified login with KDE Identity. With my KDE sysadmin hat on, I'll say we
> might implement Persona only if someone comes up with a concrete proposal of
> how it would integrate with Identity. Supporting KDE Identity *and* OpenID
> *and* Persona as totally independent login options is absolutely a no-go.

Based on the complicated integration which sites such as the wikis and
forum must deal with to support both their legacy user databases and
Identity, I would strongly recommend against multiple sources of
login.

Identity itself cannot support OpenID/Persona either, because it
requires that control over email addresses be confirmed. We cannot
trust OpenID/Persona providers to assure this for us.

>
> As a second objection, it was announced *yesterday*, and I bet few people in
> this list even know anything about it at this early point. We won't be early
> adopters, at least not at such an extreme (I'm relatively new to KDE
> compared to its 10+ year history, but I'll take the guess that KDE has never
> integrated with new technology within a *day* of its announcement of
> existence).

Regards,
Ben