When logged into YouTube scope the video aggregator some sometimes pops up the OA loading screen, then the results go blank

[Pete Woods]

1) Log into YouTube scope.
2) Reboot.
3) When first using the Dash, sometimes when browsing to the Videos (aggregator) scope, you get the OA loading screen.
4) This usually results in the the scope going blank.

I *think* I've even seen the OA loading thing happen without going to the Video scope, but I'm not certain.

[Alberto Mardegan (mardy)]

This bug is not in the unity-scopes-{shell,api}, although they could somehow (but not easily) work around it.

The problem is that when an application (or scope, in this case) asks Online Accounts for an OAuth token, in the best case it gets a cached token, but sometimes (if the cached token does not exist or is expired) we need to go through the full OAuth process. This involves firing up a WebView, but showing it is not always necessary -- on the contrary, since we are caching the cookies, often the remote websites immediately redirects us to the callback URL from which we can obtain the OAuth token. When this redirection happens immediately, we don't call show() on the QQuickWindow which runs the Webview, and we immediately return the result to the caller application.

However, due to bug 1352251, even though we never call show() on the QQuickWindow, a splash screen is shown. And unfortunately, we need to instantiate a QGuiApplication in order to run the WebView, so I'm afraid there is no way we can easily workaround this in Online Accounts.

So, the solution is to fix bug 1352251; on the other hand, since this would be a risky change (and possibly with lots of unwanted side-effects), I would propose to <hack>only (and always) disable the splash screen for /usr/bin/online-accounts-ui</hack>.

[Gerry Boland (gerboland)]

So the two options we thought of to solve this are:
1. add hack to unity8, so suppress showing splash screen for online-accounts alone
2. add extra flag to desktop file like X-Ubuntu-Splash=False which tells unity8 not to draw splash screen, and have OA set that.

I dislike option 2 more, as it would allow any app to avoid having a splash screen. What do other people think?