RFC Multiple users of cloud storage

Dirk Hohndel dirk at hohndel.org
Wed May 18 05:59:37 PDT 2016


> On May 18, 2016, at 5:44 AM, Robert Helling <helling at lmu.de> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> we had now several users asking for a possibility to use more than one cloud logbook in parallel.
> 
> The local path for the repository is derived from the users email address (which happens to be her username as far as git is concerned) and this together with the password/pin in stored in the settings which is per user (of the OS). 
> 
> So the standard response is to use different accounts on your computer and this keeps the two cloud storages separate. But some users might not like this for example because they want to share dives between users or because the way they have set up their computer at home which has only a single account for everybody (for sure not a great idea).
> 
> Maybe we should be more flexible at this point. I am writing this because before I start investing time in writing this, I want to make sure that you guys don’t hate this approach. This is not so much about how to present this to the user (hopefully in a non-intrusive way that can easily be ignored by the vast majority of the users that don’t want to have multiple accounts).
> 
> This is more about the internal handling. What is the local path name and in that go I would also address the fact that currently Dirk’s cloud server is more or less hard coded into the program.
> 
> I don’t necessarily invite our users to run their own cloud servers (as we don’t want to maintain and trouble shoot those) but I came to this problem also when playing with the CHIP/RaspberryPi approach to connect mobiles to dive computers: I am still entertaining the possibility that the embedded device presents itself as a cloud server to the phone. For this I would also need flexibility to set the remote repository.
> 
> This would now be the moment to say “No don’t. This is a user experience/maintanance/whatever nightmare! We are not going down that road”.
> 
> Because otherwise, I would start exploring that road.

So before you explore too much, current master already supports multi user and I use that all the time for my testing.
Look at commit 3f6366. Yes, this is brute force and it does, indeed, require different email addresses, but for the typical use case (my husband and I both use Subsurface, I want to use Subsurface for my dives and my daughter's dives) I think this really is all you need. And it requires zero UI changes (which I especially liked).
Of course on the Mac this is least easy to use (silly Mac), so I'm open to having a different mechanism to switch between accounts. But I just wanted to point out that I have at least thought of a way to implement this commonly requested feature.

/D




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