Re: [gentoo-dev] [News item review] V2 Chromium access to Google services

[Aisha Tammy]

On 3/8/21 5:19 PM, Thomas Deutschmann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 2021-03-08 20:01, Stephan Hartmann wrote:
>> Starting March 15th, 2021 Google Chrome Team will restrict access to
>>  Google APIs and services that are reserved for Google use only. This
>>  means that users are no longer able to login into their Google
>> Accounts which disables access to for example Chrome Sync.
>
> Maybe outline that this will only affect browser functions. You can
> still log in into your Google Account when accessing
> https://accounts.google.com/.
>
>
>> As a consequence we have to remove Client ID and secret from all
>> www-client/chromium ebuilds. This change has already been done for
>> =www-client/chromium-89.0.4389.82. Other versions will be updated
>> shortly.
>
> My first reaction was: WTF?! Why remove... maybe add a reference to [2]
> already or quote
>
>> As explained in section above, signing in to Google web is rate
>> limited if the developer has configured a client ID and client
>> secret. To avoid hitting this limit in Chromium Derivatives, please
>> remove the OAuth 2.0 client ID and client secret from your build
>> configuration.
>
> directly in the news item.
As quantitative feedback helps, I second this! I had the exact same 
reaction.

Aisha

>
> That said, I wonder if there's a use case to allow users to bake-in
> custom credentials. I know at least one large Gentoo setup distributing
> Firefox to its users with custom keys. This is possible via environment
> variables set at build time, see
> https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/www-client/firefox/firefox-86.0.ebuild?id=dfe26277ee7441d00d88da14691cfc48db85ac8a#n453
>
>
>
>> If you need one of the Google use only APIs, then you either have to
>>  switch to www-client/google-chrome{-beta,-unstable} or setup your
>> own keys [1].
>
> Should be
>
>   www-client/google-chrome{,-beta,-unstable}
>                           ^^^
>
>
>> However, the latter is only intended for development. Documentation
>> on how to generate and use own keys can be found in [2].
>
> I wouldn't mention that at all. Either there is suitable way to keep
> status quo or there isn't.
>
> My suggestion:
>
> <Tell what's happening and maybe explain why or link to Google's
> announcement>
>
> <Tell consequences for Gentoo, i.e. ebuilds will no longer have set
> client_id or client_secret as explained in last paragraph of [2].>
>
> <Tell user if they have own ids/secrets that they can set them via
> environment variable at runtime (and or build-time if you are going to
> support that) or add reference to [2] again.>
>
>