GNOME Online Accounts is a daemon plus a D-Bus API, and the daemon
already runs in this session -- gvfs activates it, and all four accounts
on this machine work without gnome-shell involved anywhere. Only the
PANEL was GNOME's. The accounts themselves are ordinary D-Bus objects
that anything may read and modify.
So everything except the initial sign-in is now native: the account
list, per-service toggles for mail, calendar, contacts, files, photos,
music and chat, and removal. That is the whole Online Accounts panel
apart from one OAuth handshake.
Signing in is the exception, and only for OAuth providers. The daemon's
AddAccount takes credentials as an argument -- it stores them, it does
not obtain them -- and the code that runs Google's OAuth exchange lives
in libgoa-backend, which Fedora ships without a GIR binding, so it is
reachable from C only. Reimplementing it would mean our own Google
client credentials. That step is handed to GNOME's panel and the page
says so, because a hand-off the user does not expect reads as a bug.
Password-based providers (Nextcloud, IMAP, WebDAV) could be added
natively later; their credential keys are known now.
Accounts needing re-authentication are surfaced first, which turned up
something immediately: both Google accounts on this machine report
attention_needed, meaning their tokens have expired and they have
stopped syncing. GOA has known that all along and nothing outside its
own panel ever said so.
Every write re-reads the account list rather than assuming it landed.
GOA can refuse, and a toggle that springs back is the honest outcome.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
