[Bug 21957] Doesn't implement SimplePresence

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21957

--- Comment #8 from Simon McVittie <simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk> 2010-10-04 11:24:05 PDT ---
I discussed this with Sjoerd this morning, trying to work out what to do with
this branch (I'd like to either merge it or abandon it before too long, so we
can run Idle through a re-indenter and my eyes can stop bleeding).

Our conclusion was that SimplePresence in its current form isn't really
suitable for IRC, because it tries to offer better guarantees that IRC can
give.

One possibility would be to move the IRC whois information to ContactInfo,
which is already suitable for poll-only use (it's like that on XMPP too).
However, that doesn't provide a very nice way to set your own status to Away,
and Sjoerd would like to be able to see (at least some) contacts' away messages
in chatrooms.

Another possibility would be to have a flag on the SimplePresence interface
indicating that this protocol can only poll presence, and a RequestPresence or
RefreshPresence method which polls and (perhaps) waits; then everyone would
have Unknown presence until polled, but UIs could poll interesting contacts as
appropriate.

One possible heuristic would be to poll the presence of everyone you highlight
(i.e. mention their nick in a message) and everyone you have a 1-1 conversation
with, once per n seconds. This would multiply traffic in a somewhat
controllable way (no more than one whois per message sent, say, rather than
stacking up presence pings for everyone in #telepathy), and if you stop
communicating with them, the UI could display their presence as Unknown after a
while.

Sjoerd doesn't think it makes sense for CMs to set policy for the point at
which presence on poll-only protocols should be considered stale, which is
consistent with our normal requirement that CMs don't set policy. However, that
could mean that different UIs consider presence to be stale at different times,
which would be somewhat confusing; perhaps the CM could be used as a
synchronization point by having a ForgetStalePresence() method?

We could have a look at how XChat does this?

If we're going to have this sort of "partial presence" on IRC, Empathy's
chatroom UI will need to display contacts' presence in some new "unobtrusive
mode", in which Unknown maps to an empty space, rather than a question mark.

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