Bug 964854 - cache account bundles

[ncalexan]

Such guesses, many work-arounds.

[rnewman]

This all looks valid, but I think it leaves the largest and riskiest hole.

That is: unless the setUserData calls were racing (in which case anything else is unnecessary), we're simply hiding the problem with a memory cache. As soon as our process is killed, we'll hit the same symptoms we get now.

That might be worth having, but perhaps it's just needless complexity.

Are you planning a follow-up to figure out what to do when we get a (partially) empty bundle back, rather than just crashing? E.g., see what we do know, and transition to the appropriate state to re-capture credentials?

[ncalexan]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 4:29 PM, Richard Newman notifications@github.com
wrote:

This all looks valid, but I think it leaves the largest and riskiest hole.

That is: unless the setUserData calls were racing (in which case anything
else is unnecessary), we're simply hiding the problem with a memory cache.
As soon as our process is killed, we'll hit the same symptoms we get now.

This is correct, but the point is that we believe Android's in memory
cache is the issue, and maintaining our own cache avoids hitting
Android's. We will still hit Android's cache on process start, but it
might be the case that Android itself needs to read from disk in order to
refresh its cache each process start.

That might be worth having, but perhaps it's just needless complexity.

Are you planning a follow-up to figure out what to do when we get a
(partially) empty bundle back, rather than just crashing? E.g., see what we
do know, and transition to the appropriate state to re-capture credentials?

This is more work than it seems because the Account state includes things
that we'd need to create valid account state, namely the server provided
opaque uid (which we don't actually use). We could transition some of the
state details into the Account user data and make it possible to go to
separated in this case. (I'm moving to this approach on iOS, where the
state details are really the state and not the account and the state.)

So my plan is to see if the band-aid helps (up-lifted to beta after a few
days) and re-assess. I could be plain wrong about Android caching issues :/

[ncalexan]

Landed.