[Telepathy] msnlibrary

[Robert McQueen]

Hi Roelof,

I've just had a quick scan of this, it looks pretty reasonable. A few
points:

1. What does a GroupChannel do that a Contact List channel doesn't?
Wouldn't it be better to have a handle type to represent server-side
groups, and then just use contact list channels with these handles
rather than list (subscribe, deny, etc) handles?

2. I notice that you've added a few MSN specific interfaces. This is
fine if it actually *is* an MSN specific feature, but things like mail
notification or delivering URI notifications are not limited to MSN, so
I'd love to see proposals for adding these things to the baseline
Telepathy spec.

3. Your architecture diagram seems to suggest that there could be a
Telepathy API *and* a UI in the same process. Whilst this is feasible,
and a valid migration strategy for existing vertical clients (from
protocol up to UI in one process) it's not particularly recommended for
new implementations because it makes it confusing to expose the full
flexibility of Telepathy for other processes. Eg, if you map requesting
a channel to creating a new conversation window in that client, a 3rd
party process can't handle the conversation window itself.

4. I really don't think it's worth spending any time on designing your
stuff usable as a direct library for hand-wavy portability reasons. If
you actually want to spend coding time doing a Win32 port of something,
spend your time on the D-Bus port and then Telepathy will become
immediately usable there - and not just your MSN library.

Regards,
Rob

roelof wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Last month I've been working at the design of a msnlib for aMSN. The
> design of this library is not entirely Telepathy based (a few stubs
> should be written to change glib signals into dbus messages), because
> the library should also be useful without Telepathy (e.g. Windows
> machines).
> 
> I appreciate if you want to have a look at the design document and can
> give me comments! The document can be found at:
> http://www.few.vu.nl/~rkemp/aMSN/msnp13lib-design-1.0.pdf
> 
> Thank you very much,
> 
> Roelof Kemp

-- 
Robert McQueen
Director, Collabora Ltd.