Mozilla Persona (BrowserID) support

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Talked to the openphoto people. They have browserid support, which looks easy and pleasant: https://browserid.org/

Furthermore, the OpenPhoto people say it's easy. So why not support it? :)

<paroneayea> hub: we don't use browserid yet
<paroneayea> but I'd like to
<jmathai> paroneayea: said there's a json spec but it's not finalized yet
<paroneayea> how hard is browserid to implement?
<paroneayea> it looks beautifully pleasant to use
<jmathai> trivial
<paroneayea> really?
<paroneayea> awesome

[Will Kahn-Greene]

I spent a few hours today looking at BrowserID. It does look easy to implement. We'd probably want to use Ian's wsgibrowserid:

https://github.com/ianb/wsgibrowserid

Some interesting things I learned:

1. browserid doesn't currently support non-browser or non-js-enabled-browser authentication
2. in order to support non-browser applications through an API, we'd have to provide another authentication backend; Ian suggested maybe OAuth
3. if we implement browserid, we essentially nix the idea of "registration". i'm not sure how this affects mediagoblin. it's possible that someone would log in and then MG would deny them access if it's not accepting new registrations?

References:

• http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.identity/browse_thread/thread/b327081cedb96a19
• https://github.com/ianb/wsgibrowserid
• https://mozillians.org/en-US/ (note no "register")

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Do we have to nix the idea of registration? Can't we associated a browserid with a registered account as an easier way to log in? Alternately, use browserid for accelerated registration?

[Will Kahn-Greene]

The original url for this bug was ​http://bugs.foocorp.net/issues/662 .

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Okay, here's some updates. More generally, I'm updating this as a "support multiple authentication login systems" ticket.

• We have a plugin system. Yayy!
• I need to have a better understanding of it. Because of that, I'm working on #477 so I can actually do some plugin work myself.
• After that's done I'd like to evaluate the state of login stuff and how we can make it more flexible.