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• Launchpad entry: ubiquity-more-user-config

• Packages affected: ubiquity

Summary

Ubiquity should be able to ask for initial user configuration for some basic online services that involve the creation of a Launchpad account.

Rationale

We want to encourage users to make use of online Ubuntu services (some of which have yet to be implemented). These services will generally make use of Launchpad authentication.

Use cases

(TODO: cjwatson to come up with some of these)

Design

We will add a section to the "Who are you?" page (which has some empty space at the moment) in Ubiquity that offers registration with Launchpad. Since most people not already involved in the Ubuntu community do not recognise the term "Launchpad", it will not be mentioned by name on this page; instead, it will use text something like "online Ubuntu services" or "Ubuntu.net", or something more specific if we decide to present some small number of primary services (this is pending investigations by the Canonical system administration team).

The first item in this new section will be a checkbox asking whether to register at all, with some descriptive text about privacy similar to that displayed to not-logged-in users on https://launchpad.net/+login, and a note that if you already have an account then you should not create another one. The rest of the section will ask for an e-mail address. A non-clashing username will be chosen automatically by Launchpad based on the e-mail address.

Ubiquity will use a yet-to-be-written Launchpad XML-RPC method to create an account using this information. An e-mail handshake will be required to validate the account (including setting a password), so we cannot rely on the account existing later in the installation.

To allow for end-to-end testing without creating large numbers of permanent accounts on Launchpad production, accounts created using this XML-RPC method will be marked in Launchpad such that they will expire in some time period unless validated.

In the event that particular services are to be configured along with account creation, then the registration UI will ask for any necessary configuration items for these on the same page. In that event, Ubiquity will copy any configuration changes made during installation to the user's home directory on the installed system, using the standard existing facilities.

Future plans

Eventually, it should become possible to set up authentication for Canonical-provided services without creating a full Launchpad account. Such authentication would not necessarily require an e-mail address.

Comments

• I think this should happen after the initial installation, since then it can be done at every new user's (by new user I mean new user account, since people tend to forget that Ubuntu is a multi-user system) first login. Maybe a balloon popping up with "This is the first time you have logged in. Click this icon to set up your new applications." would be more appropriate? Adding to this, though, maybe any changed settings on the Live CD should be saved to the first user account. For example, I enter my GAIM accounts whilst using the Live CD, so I can chat whilst Ubuntu is installing. It would be cool if they carried over to the installation, maybe with a button asking the user "You have changed some settings in this live session. Would you like these changes to be applied to the "insert name here" user account?" (This should happen because settings like those of GAIM include passwords, and I also use GAIM when installing Ubuntu on other people's computers, which I obviously don't want to get filled with my login details) -- Warbo

• If this specification covers adding accounts from non-Canonical servers, the code should take care to not ask questions that migration-assistant has already asked, such as "do you want to set up your AOL IM account?"
• I think this might be attacking the problem in reverse order. For example, to introduce a backup-to-server service:
  1. Implement the backup service, with an easy-to-use client.
  2. For one release, ship it by default in an out-of-the-way place, so any teething troubles can be resolved with limited impact.

  3. For the next release, decide on the best way to advertise the service to everyone. This might be in the installer, but would more likely be somewhere that was also accessible after installation.

  An example of what would happen more often if asking for registration at the wrong time, Mallory Chua in #launchpad 2007-01-13: "I'm one of those bewildered newbies (created a launchpad account when I first installed Ubuntu, and now months later I want to start contributing and realize I've lost that email) ..." -- mpt
• It would be good to change Launchpad's authentification system so that it lets the user choose OpenID, Google Accounts (this IS possible).. and hence provide the user with more services, and enable him to re-use existing accounts he has.
• It would be really cool if this could be used to coordinate user data among various Ubuntu installations. Some people might have only one Ubuntu machine, but others may have many and keeping the configuration of things like gaim, desktop configuration, thunderbird, mozilla bookmarks, etc. in sync can be a real challenge! It would have to be able to handle multiple configs though (e.g. the resolution on my laptop is much smaller than that on my desktop).

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