[Bug 69493] status of non-buddies should be (UNKNOWN, 'unknown', ''), not an error

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69493

--- Comment #2 from Simon McVittie <simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk> ---
(In reply to comment #1)
> To be more precise, I think that OFFLINE should not exist in salut and
> replaced by UNKNOWN. no ?

I don't think so. My mental model is that in mDNS, my local LAN is analogous to
the server (or network of federated servers) in a centralized protocol - so
anyone I can see is online, and everyone else is offline. There's no such thing
as "I can't see that you're online, but maybe I don't have permission to do
so?"

Perhaps you're online on *your* local LAN, but in my mental model, that's a
different "server", and on *my* "server", you're definitely offline. (Replace
"my local LAN" with "Freenode" and "your local LAN" with "OFTC", or Facebook
and Windows Live, or any other pair of non-cooperating services.)

The reason why non-buddies on a conventional IM network should be UNKNOWN is
that we can't authoritatively say "Fred is online"/"Fred is offline" if we
wouldn't receive his presence anyway. That doesn't apply to Salut.

Something that *does* apply to Salut is that GetPresences() should always
return *something* for any valid handle, i.e. if you call the
TpPresenceMixinGetContactStatusesFunc with valid handles (which it may, and
should, assume), it should always succeed and return a presence per contact. In
next, it no longer has its GError argument.

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