[Bug 29728] New: ContactManager::addGroup and removeGroup are confusing/broken

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29728

           Summary: ContactManager::addGroup and removeGroup are
                    confusing/broken
           Product: Telepathy
           Version: git master
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: minor
          Priority: medium
         Component: tp-qt4
        AssignedTo: telepathy-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
        ReportedBy: ollisal at gmail.com
         QAContact: telepathy-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org


ContactManager::addGroup is described as "Attempt to add an user-defined
contact list group". Therefore, (and judging from the naming), one would expect
that after the returned PendingOperation has finished successfully, the group
would have actually been added (I know, right?), and would be usable for eg.
adding contacts to it.

In reality however, the PendingOperation finishes as soon as the underlying
EnsureChannel D-Bus call to the CM has returned. While this is, indeed, when
the group is actually added at the CM level, at this point the ContactManager
internals still haven't picked up the new group, and, for example, trying to
add a contact to the seemingly newly-added group fails! A work-around is to
wait for the groupAdded signal for the group in question - but this is really
error-prone, as the signal may well have been emitted already (and will be, if
we fix this bug properly)!

The fix would be to make a private PendingOperation subclass, which would first
make the EnsureChannel call, and if that's successful, and the new group hasn't
been picked up yet, wait for the new group to be picked up (by the groupAdded()
signal) before finishing. Then, the operation being finished() would truly mean
that the group is now usable by the usual methods manipulating it.

Similarly, the removeGroup PendingOperation returns as soon as the Channel's
Close method has returned (and the group has been removed from the server).
However, contacts can still seemingly be added to the group etc. until the
channel being invalidated is picked up by the ContactManager internals, and
groupRemoved() is emitted (probably in the next few mainloop iterations)! This
is less of a problem though, as you generally shouldn't need to worry about a
removed group anymore - it's still confusing however, as the PendingOperation
to eg. add a contact to a group in this state will probably fail with "The
method AddMembers on bahbah interface doesn't exist" (because the Channel
doesn't exist anymore) instead of the intended "The group doesn't exist".

The fix for this, then, is obviously waiting for groupRemoved in the
removeGroup PendingOperation if the group still exists in the ContactManager
internals after the Channel has been closed.

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