Volunteers Needed!

Posted by Ross Burton on January 18, 2012

Those lovely people over at Flickr have finally bitten the bullet and are turning off FlickrAuth in the summer, meaning that all applications that use the Flickr API need to use OAuth.

This is something I totally agree with, whilst FlickrAuth works and was clearly an important influence on OAuth, it's a single-service protocol when OAuth has managed to get massive adoption and a huge developer base.

The problem I've got is libsocialweb, which has a Flickr module that allows both fetching of your contact's recent photos and uploading images. This uses FlickrAuth so at the end of July will suddenly stop working. I've got enough on my plate at the moment and would love for more people to understand how the entire social spagetti works, so this is a call for a volunteer to work on this, for which I'll obviously be available to offer any guidance and mentoring required.

There are two ways of approaching this, the easy way and the slightly harder way.

The easy way is to update libsocialweb to use an OAuthProxy instead of a FlickrProxy, and update the module metadata so that Bisho uses the generic OAuth flow instead of a Flickr-specific flow. This should be fairly simple and needs to happen soon so that any distributions that are using libsocialweb don't break in the summer.

The harder way is to add Flickr support to gnome-online-accounts, using the Twitter service as an example, and then port the Flickr service in libsocialweb to use gnome-online-accounts to authenticate. I've a proof of concept for the librest-goa integration which will be a useful starting point. This is more of a proof of concept for libsocialweb, we've been looking at moving away from Bisho but haven't done anything substantial yet.

Ideally both of these happen, so the current code will continue to work in the future and the GOA work demonstrates how GOA and libsocialweb would work together. So, anyone interested?

tags: tech