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Bug 678112 - Need user visible documentation
Need user visible documentation
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: gnome-online-accounts
Classification: Core
Component: general
unspecified
Other Linux
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: Maintainers of Gnome user documentation
GNOME Online Accounts maintainer(s)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2012-06-14 15:34 UTC by David Escott
Modified: 2013-03-05 10:09 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---


Attachments
The "Bad" Online Accounts (38.81 KB, image/png)
2013-03-05 02:38 UTC, David Escott
Details
The "Good" Online Accounts (60.03 KB, image/png)
2013-03-05 02:39 UTC, David Escott
Details

Description David Escott 2012-06-14 15:34:52 UTC
The current gui for online-accounts is rather spartan, and just shows the various ON/OFF options for different things like Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Chat, and Documents. Its not at all clear what it would mean for something to be on or off.

Does GOA control
   (a) what events appear in the calendar dropdown?
   (b) what popups appear for mail?
   (c) preferred accounts from which mail will automatically be sent from? [in which case "Chat" doesn't make sense]
   (d) is it just a single signon tool?

I honestly have no idea what this is supposed to do.
Comment 1 Tiffany Antopolski 2012-07-01 04:47:08 UTC
There are some pages written in the Gnome User Guide about gnome-online-accounts which answer some of the above questions:

http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/accounts.html.en

Perhaps a "help" button linked to the system installed files would be beneficial?
Comment 2 Debarshi Ray 2012-07-02 11:14:11 UTC
Clicking the "help" button in the application menu, while in the Online Accounts panel already shows the guide.
Comment 3 David Escott 2012-07-02 12:44:00 UTC
(In reply to comment #1)
> There are some pages written in the Gnome User Guide about
> gnome-online-accounts which answer some of the above questions:
> 
> http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/accounts.html.en

Looked at that documentation. The most useful page is:
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/accounts-which-application.html.en

I would suggest that maybe instead of having these abstract toggles "Chat" "Calendar" "Documents" etc... there should be toggles for applications "Empathy (Chat)" "Evolution (Mail and Calendar)" etc... Then when an application registers as being capable of working with the online accounts interface the application can describe exactly what it intends to do with the online registration.

The way things currently are it is just unclear. Why do I have the online accounts dialog if empathy has its own dialog for creating and setting up accounts? What advantage is the one over the other? Does Evolution consider only the Mail toggle or the Mail and Calendar toggle? Does flipping the toggle in any way affect what account is the primary default account for new mail/new events? Do all my documents get backed up to an account that has "Documents" set to ON?

If all this does is Single Sign On, then that is a fairly well understood and easily explained concept, so describe it as that. It can say "joe.user@gmail.com Enable Single Sign On for the following categories." Right now, I just can't tell from what I'm seeing and reading if its supposed to be doing anything more than SSO.
Comment 4 David Escott 2012-07-02 12:44:24 UTC
(In reply to comment #2)
> Clicking the "help" button in the application menu, while in the Online
> Accounts panel already shows the guide.

What help button?
Comment 5 Tiffany Antopolski 2012-07-02 16:25:31 UTC
(In reply to comment #2)

Not in Fedora 17: Contacts 3.4.1.
Comment 6 Tiffany Antopolski 2012-07-02 16:33:41 UTC
(In reply to comment #3)
David,

Thank-you for your detailed feedback.  We will improve on these pages, most likely during the docs hackfest next month, and bring them up-to-date.
Comment 7 David Escott 2012-07-02 16:36:50 UTC
Glad its helpful. If I knew what the thing was doing I would be happy to help write some documentation.
Comment 8 Tiffany Antopolski 2012-07-02 16:42:40 UTC
If you figure it out, we'll gladly accept your contributions :-)
Comment 9 Debarshi Ray 2012-07-04 05:23:41 UTC
(In reply to comment #4)
> (In reply to comment #2)
>> Clicking the "help" button in the application menu, while in the Online
>> Accounts panel already shows the guide.
> 
> What help button?

It is possible that this was a recent addition.

I am running GNOME 3.5.3 here, which is not in any stable distribution. So, in the worst case, you will get it when GNOME 3.6 comes out in September this year.
Comment 10 Debarshi Ray 2012-08-14 13:16:03 UTC
(In reply to comment #3)
> The way things currently are it is just unclear. Why do I have the online
> accounts dialog if empathy has its own dialog for creating and setting up
> accounts? What advantage is the one over the other?

This is something that we plan to address for GNOME 3.8 -- merging empathy-accounts into the online accounts panel.
Comment 11 Debarshi Ray 2013-01-08 17:55:04 UTC
ping - Just curious what is going on here. Are we happy with the state of the user help? Do we want to improve it? Or were we just waiting for GNOME 3.6 to be released so that the help is available to the users?
Comment 12 Debarshi Ray 2013-03-04 21:24:00 UTC
ping -Can I assume that everything is fine and close this as INVALID?
Comment 13 David Escott 2013-03-05 02:37:04 UTC
Its hard for me to say, I'm downstream from you so I only see what I have. Certainly not any better on Debian Unstable online-accounts-3.4.2-2, but if this work is in 3.8 I won't have seen it yet.

With Ubuntu 12.10 there is online-accounts-3.6.0-0ubuntu1 and there are in fact two "Online Accounts" listed in Control Center. I'm not sure which is which, and why I have two. I've attached screenshots of the "Good" and "Bad" variants. Where I consider the "Good" version good because it tells exactly what each application will do with the login.
Comment 14 David Escott 2013-03-05 02:38:00 UTC
Created attachment 238077 [details]
The "Bad" Online Accounts

This is Online-Accounts 3.4.2 and I consider it "bad" and unclear.
Comment 15 David Escott 2013-03-05 02:39:05 UTC
Created attachment 238078 [details]
The "Good" Online Accounts

I'm not sure which version of Online Accounts this is, but it appears as an entry in control center for Ubuntu 12.10
Comment 16 Debarshi Ray 2013-03-05 10:05:19 UTC
(In reply to comment #13)

> Where I consider the "Good" version good because it tells exactly what each
> application will do with the login.

Just so we are clear about this.

There is no way to do this reliably. The only thing you can do is hope that each application that will be using your account tells you the truth about what it will be doing.

There is no way for you to know if an application is saying something but doing something else unless you read through the sources, and if you have a proprietary blob on your system, then only $DEITY can help you. :-)

Having said that, currently, in GNOME Online Accounts, the on|off switches are named after the core GNOME applications that are going to be using your data. The documentation also has a "Which applications take advantage of online accounts" entry. But as I said before, all this assumes that the applications are truthful and hence not reliable.
Comment 17 Debarshi Ray 2013-03-05 10:07:40 UTC
(In reply to comment #15)
> Created an attachment (id=238078) [details]
> The "Good" Online Accounts
> 
> I'm not sure which version of Online Accounts this is, but it appears as an
> entry in control center for Ubuntu 12.10

That is Ubuntu's own sign-on framework and has nothing to do with GNOME Online Accounts.

Even then, all that I said earlier still holds. There is no reliable way for you to know that the applications that are listed there are the only ones using your data and they are using it in the way they claim to be.

We won't invest too much time in listing out applications any more than we do now, unless we work out a mechanism to sandbox applications to make this work reliably and securely.
Comment 18 Debarshi Ray 2013-03-05 10:09:45 UTC
Closing this as FIXED because the documentation mentions the names of applications using online accounts since versions 3.5.x/3.6.x.