[Bug 23155] Connection: make handles survive until disconnection

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23155

--- Comment #8 from Will Thompson <will.thompson at collabora.co.uk> 2010-11-21 06:52:26 PST ---
Brainstorming this with Rob, Pekka and Aki at the MeeGo Conference led to the
following rough proposal for 1.0:

  • In the D-Bus API, replace handles with (ss) tuples, where the first field
is the vCard field, and the second field is the contact ID.
  • Cellular conference call-style meaningless channel-specific-handles could
have a dummy namespace and look something like this: ("meaningless",
"1234:really:tel:+441234567890").
  • General channel-specific handles could have some similar convention. Or
maybe we could use (sss) throughout.

Using tuples rather than just strings makes Addressing more native than it will
be in 0.x; it also makes it more obvious to applications that they should only
store things that the CM has normalized. The argument that applications will
confuse normalized and non-normalized strings is fair, but applications not
using bindings mess up handles, too, and in applications using bindings we can
use the host language's type system to distinguish the two.

Using strings throughout would make dbus-monitor traffic easier to read, would
remove a whole section of Telepathy that currently needs explaining, and would
also remove the memory-leak objection to immortal handles: CMs could forget
contact ID tuples when they're done with them, safe in the knowledge that they
can re-create them if a client uses one.

(Internally, telepathy-glib's API could replace TpHandle with GObjects that get
passed around implementing a particular interface... TpSvcContact, say. This
preserves fast comparisons and so on.

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