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

[Thomas Deutschmann]

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.

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.>


-- 
Regards,
Thomas Deutschmann / Gentoo Linux Developer
fpr: C4DD 695F A713 8F24 2AA1 5638 5849 7EE5 1D5D 74A5