[Bug 16891] Telepathy should support OTR encryption

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16891

--- Comment #90 from Simon McVittie <simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk> ---
(In reply to comment #87)
> Why is the patch protocol-specific? 

Telepathy does not have any central point where OTR can be done for all
protocols and all UIs simultaneously. We can either do it once per protocol
backend, or once per UI. Once per UI would break the ability to log OTR
messages or have them appear correctly in more than one UI (e.g. both Empathy
and GNOME Shell). Every attempt at implementing OTR in Telepathy has had the
plan to do it once per protocol backend; this implementation is no different.
In practice, like most new features, everyone prototyped it in the XMPP
protocol backend first, because that's the one that works best.

I think the approach that is most likely to yield results in a finite time is
to get the XMPP implementation high-quality and mergeable first, then expand to
the other protocols; then any implementation mistakes in the first
implementation will hopefully not be repeated, and the rest will be a simple
matter of "pretty much what Gabble did". Using a library for common code, or
adding functionality to libotr, would be fine too, but that's an implementation
detail.

Anyone interested in this could add similar glue to telepathy-haze to cover the
various proprietary protocols (AOL, etc.). It might have seemed more natural to
go for -haze first, but -haze uses libpurple, which is not really designed for
things that aren't shaped like Pidgin, so it can be awkward to get right and
doesn't make a great place for prototyping. The missing protocol backends after
that would be telepathy-salut for link-local XMPP, telepathy-idle for IRC, and
telepathy-rakia for SIP. I think it'd make sense to do -haze and maybe -salut.
I'm not sure -idle or -rakia is necessarily worthwhile, but if people do use
OTR on those protocols in practice, sure, why not.

(In reply to comment #87)
> Would it be possible to use the same code for the new gnome-chat application
> which will likely replace Empathy?

The majority of the glue between Telepathy and libotr (as exemplified here by
patches to Gabble), and the design: yes, it lives in the protocol backend(s).

The UI: no, the UI code in Empathy is specific to Empathy. gnome-chat would
need to provide a way to enable/disable OTR and mark fingerprints as trusted,
and to be properly secure, it would need to display the notifications from
libotr in a way that cannot be spoofed by contacts.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the QA Contact for the bug.
You are the assignee for the bug.