Breakout: UI and user vision for cloud services

[Aleix Pol]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 10:54 AM, Elvis Angelaccio
<elvis.angelaccio at kde.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 5:17 AM, Martin Klapetek
> <martin.klapetek at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Jonathan Riddell <jr at jriddell.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> <Sho_> * Services integration - I see more and more users who have
>>> data locked up in clouds (GDrive, etc.) and rely on accessing it
>>>     <Sho_> Gnome has GDrive integration, we need to do more on getting
>>> cloud filesystems into our software too, but we dropped the ball on
>>> KAccounts etc. for now
>>
>>
>> As the former KAccounts maintainer, I'd like to share some insights on this.
>>
>> The tech is there. It's proven by real world usage in Ubuntu (incl. Phone),
>> Meego before that (iirc) and to some extent also Gnome, which has its own
>> fork of the same thing (I guess they just really don't like Qt anywhere).
>> Also
>> Elementary is using one of these, but I don't remember which. And if I'm
>> not mistaken, also Jolla in their phones.
>>
>> So we have the tech, but what we're missing are two things, really.
>>
>> 1) Things actually using it. We've had KAccounts for a while but there was
>> nothing taking advantage of it, except KDE Telepathy, which migrated fully
>> to it. So it sort of became a synonym for KTp accounts config. On the other
>> hand, there was nothing much else that would actually need it. There was
>> an OwnCloud lib or Plasma thingy at some point where I pleaded to have the
>> account setup done through (K)Accounts to boost the adoption, but it never
>> happened. Related to that is...
>>
>> 2) Buy in from PIM. I mean, let's face it, the real accounts user in the
>> system
>> is PIM, with all the emails and calendars and contacts and what not. This
>> obviously requires quite some large effort to actually migrate everything to
>> it and sadly the PIM team is long time understaffed. Now with the new Sink
>> thing, this could have been a chance, but, again, after asking couple times
>> about the accounts plan, (K)Accounts was never in the picture. And that's
>> a problem.
>>
>> And so now we have this system that nobody in/around KDE wants to use.
>> My take on it is that people (devs) don't really understand how that system
>> works and how to take advantage of it, which is partly my fault. It is
>> fairly
>> complex system on the inside with lots of points of possible breakages, but
>> also allows for great flexibility all around.
>>
>> So, imho, in order to successfully follow literally every other desktop
>> these
>> days, it needs a proper full integration in all things using accounts. And
>> it really
>> shouldn't be just an afterthought. It needs to be put right at the core of
>> those
>> things and workflows should be redesigned to take that into account (heh).
>> It
>> needs to be a conscious community-wide effort, like Frameworks was.
>> Otherwise
>> KAccounts will stay exactly where it is now - a promising (egg-)shell that
>> has no
>> real use.
>>
>> Unfortunately if the past two years are any indication, especially with
>> Sink,
>> the road ahead is not very bright.
>>
>> I'm happy to try my best to answer any possible future questions about the
>> system
>> you might have. Friedrich Kossebau was also writing a tutorial about it at
>> some
>> point, but I'm not sure where it ended up (if at all; I also failed to
>> follow up on that).
>
>
> Hi Martin,
> I'm planning to integrate KAccounts with kio-gdrive, so your email is
> very much appreciated.
> What exactly is "Kaccounts" in the first place? Are we talking about
> the kaccounts-integration repo?
> A tutorial would be great, but maybe is enough to look at the KDE
> Telepathy usage. Could you share more details about this?

Purpose Youtube integration is using it [1]. You can easily use the
GetCredentialsJob for these things, or directly use AccountsSSO for
less dependencies.

Aleix

[1] https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=purpose.git&a=blob&h=b0d08c489965a330dd140590856a7d802f5efaea&hb=a7be97ffd5610a27360eedf2938efc8be04ff5f4&f=src%2Fplugins%2Fyoutube%2Fyoutubejobcomposite.cpp