Libsecret revealed [LWN.net]

Libsecret revealed

Posted Apr 5, 2012 4:37 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
Parent article: Libsecret revealed

Hopefully libsecret's thread-safety and portability across desktop environments will make it possible for Firefox and other browsers to support it. Previous attempts to integrate Firefox with gnome-keyring led to painful issues with thread safety.

to post comments

Libsecret revealed

Posted Apr 6, 2012 19:52 UTC (Fri) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link] (2 responses)

Indeed - hopefully this indicates a trend toward better compatibility and standardization between Gnome and KDE. (If just those two could agree on things, and they were open enough that Xfce could be compatible, we'd finally have a "standard" Linux desktop for application developers to target.)

People using weird window managers are generally happy to compile their own stuff, and they tend to avoid sourceless applications anyway, so they don't matter for this sorta discussion. I am one of those people, and aside from having hardware compatibility, I couldn't care less what the fate of the Linux desktop is.

Libsecret revealed

Posted Apr 6, 2012 20:02 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (1 responses)

> Indeed - hopefully this indicates a trend toward better compatibility and standardization between Gnome and KDE. (If just those two could agree on things, and they were open enough that Xfce could be compatible, we'd finally have a "standard" Linux desktop for application developers to target.)

That trend has existed for years. GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and other environments already agree on quite a bit. Many standards exist to make sure applications from all of those environments interoperate, and new standards (such as this one) pop up frequently to unify common functionality.

Really good work

Posted Apr 7, 2012 5:00 UTC (Sat) by CChittleborough (subscriber, #60775) [Link]

I agree. I've seen many good shared standards coming out of freedesktop.org which significantly improve user experience. This is one of the Linux/Unix community's great accomplishments, and the people responsible deserve lots of praise ... more than they seem to get, IMO.

Libsecret revealed

Posted Apr 9, 2012 16:48 UTC (Mon) by Ben_P (guest, #74247) [Link]

Are there data corruption races with calling gnome-keyring more than one thread? What kind of issues were/are there? It seems like the kind of problem that could reasonably be deferred with a mutex until the library could be made concurrent.