Today at the IM, Contacts and Social hackfest we talked about supporting chat accounts in GNOME Online Accounts.
I did some work exposing accounts from GNOME Online Accounts to Telepathy (Bug #652543). It still needs a little bit of work, but from Empathy it looks like this ((ignore the other Google Talk entry, that’s my non-GOA chat account)):
With this work Empathy will prompt for the account password when there is a GOA account. Guillaume is currently working on extending Empathy’s authentication handler to authenticate automatically using the credentials from GOA (#652546).
Bastien is extending GOA to include a Chat account type so that you can control whether to enable chat from Online Accounts (#652574).
Great work. Tanks for all.
I still think having two separate dialogs to set accounts depending if they fit in DavidZ’s vision of “online” or not is bullshit. We should have a single account system for all kinds of accounts: mail, voip, sharing, other, misc.
@Olivier: regardless, we would still need this technology to expose the accounts to Telepathy.
There is one thing I don’t understand, why not put all chat accounts in GOA?
In any case, it’s great to see progress on that front. Contacts and accounts management is something that has always bothered me as it was scattered in lots of applications and settings.
I just wish you’d go much further and integrate **all** accounts together (email, chat, web services,…)
@bochecha: my work doesn’t have anything to do with where accounts are set up, and instead is for providing accounts configured in GNOME Online Accounts to Telepathy.
The way things will probably look is that GNOME Online Accounts will let you set up single-sign-on accounts (which will set up email, IM, calendaring, etc.), and then have buttons to take you to the IM accounts dialog and email accounts dialog to add accounts which aren’t single-sign-on.