[Telepathy] Saying hi

[Raphael Slinckx]

Hi !

Since we are starting to discuss the Mission control subject i might
just stop lurking and say hello too !

I recently started working for collabora on a gtk/gnome UI for telepathy
codenamed 'cohoba'. The aim is to provide a completely integrated way to
talk to people in the gnome desktop, and not just be a gaim/psi or
whatever common interface we have these days (not that it's bad, but
being innovative is a good advantage for telepathy acceptance)

The code can be found in collabora darcs repos under telepathy-gnome
module.

Right now it support only text conversations and a merged contactlist
for different accounts, as well as rough support for tagging contacts
and creating groups of contacts. I work on it as soon as i get some free
time but these days, university work is overwhelming.

> Our first steps are to nail down the specification of mission control  
> and to propose a first desktop interface specification for clients.  
> And we will create a project page real soon (currently writing some  
> text for it) to show what we are doing..
> Our major aim will be the integration into KDE and to provide  
> connection manager for Asterisk and real telephony hardware. I hope  
> we will be able to fill the white spots in Telepathy.
> 

On my side i would love starting implementing whatever mission control
interface results from the work for gnome, maybe reusing common code if
it's useful (if the mission control code is non-trivial), but i doubt it
will require lot of code sharing since the tasks are basic for the most
part.

This also include integration of accounts setup for example in
evolution-data-server or gnome-keyring, so the user can setup his
accounts in a capplet once for all and then all telepathy UI will 'just
work'.

> > So, today I have been reading up on
> > your project and it sounds quite interesting. I've been having  
> > ideas in
> > this direction for a while, only Jabber specific.
> 
> Cool. I still like to initiate a discussion about the question, what  
> should be inside of misson-control and what should stay on the  
> desktop. As I read in the overview from Robert, that Raphaël Slinckx  
> implements some functionality of it into Cohoba. Maybe he wants to  
> provide some information what he has done, and what he thinks about  
> this?
> 

What i have in cohoba isn't a proper mission control. I have an
interface for setting up accounts and starting/stopping connections, as
well as code for handling incoming text and contact list channels.

I don't really like the way it is because all is too coupled together
which is what telepathy want to avoid, the user interface would just
have to ask mission control "give me all the connections the user has
setup (and if necessary create the connections)".

The mission control should also have access to account credentials to be
able to log in, in whatever way the underlying desktop works (gconf in
gnome for example)

And finally about the incoming channel handling, i'm not sure how this
can be achieved without being too intrusive. Maybe as we discussed the
other, some field in .desktop files can be used to indicate that a
program can handle dbus interface x and y, the mission control would
then scan the available programs and start the correct program to handle
channel types.

I think Robert was willing to send an email to the list with a first
mision control interface draft "real soon now"..

I'm looking forward to see the spec coming alive, and start working
properly on cohoba again :)

See you !

Raphael