GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 743609
Add configure options to disable libsecret detection
Last modified: 2018-06-29 23:38:02 UTC
Created attachment 295603 [details] [review] Patch to configure.ac to allow for disabling of password storage Some people may prefer to not use the password storage capabilities and therefore remove the dependence on libsecret, gnome-keyring, and dbus. From my reading of the code, libsecret is optional, but will be detected if available. Therefore, simply adding an option to disable libsecret would be all that is needed. See gentoo bug 537930: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=537930 Attached is a quick and dirty proof of concept patch. The option should probably be something more along the lines of --disable-libsecret though.
Thank you for the patch and bringing this issue to our attention. I can indeed imagine some people prefer not to store passwords in some kind of key store. And I agree GnuCash handles this poorly because it will use such a store if it finds one. On the other hand I'd rather see this fixed at the user interface level rather than at the build configure level. I guess for gentoo users this distinction is very subtle because that audience is used to build their own packages and configure them as they want. So configure is already a very individual experience there. On other distros and platforms however there is one person building gnucash, which then gets installed by many. If that one person decides one way in configure those users are usually unable to switch to the other way. Would it be an acceptable alternative for the gentoo crowd if the dialog windows where you can specify a password get an extra option "Remember password" (which defaults to "no") ? That way everybody would have the choice, regardless of whether or not libsecret is installed. Finally I also read through the gentoo bug report and I don't understand the issue around libsecret and dbus very well. That's probably because I'm not familiar with the finer details of ebuild. The way I see it libsecret is optional already: if not present on the system it won't be used. So can't gentoo make it optional in its ebuild system just as it is now ? Note that gnucash depends on gsettings, which by default on linux also depends on dbus as backend. Unless gentoo provides options to use another backend, that means gnucash already depends on dbus.
The GUI for allowing people to store passwords will also be great for us but please note that a configure USE flag to not link to libsecret would still be needed to prevent automagic dependencies: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Quality_Assurance/Automagic_dependencies
Thanks Pacho for the pointer. It helped me understand why this remains an issue on Gentoo. I have slightly extended the OP's patch to error out if password storage is explicitly requested at configure time and no suitable backend is found. Other than that it works like the OP proposed: enabled by default (and used if found), with the option to explicitly disable using --disable-password-storage
*** Bug 730720 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
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