[Telepathy] mission control API

[Dafydd Harries]

Ar 13/10/2006 am 11:44, ysgrifennodd Tobias Hunger:
> PROTOCOLMANAGER:
> 
> In the interest of abstraction (yes, I know you do not like that too much;-) 
> I'm implementing a ProtocolManager. It is a really thin wrapper around 
> tapioca-qt that hides the ConnectionManagers from the view of the application 
> programmer. It has a very simple API which allows to query CMs by protocol 
> and has a method to return the "preferred CM" for a protocol. I am pretty 
> sure we will end up with several CMs for each protocol (we are working on 
> open source after all;-) and so there must be a way to configure which one to 
> use.
> 
> It is further no use to require a application programmer to remember 
> that "gabble" == "jabber" ;-)

On the contrary, I think this is a very worthwhile abstraction. A similar
abstraction is employed on the 770. We should hide the concept of connection
managers from the user -- the user is only interested in which protocols they
can use. The main difference is that (IIRC) it just picks the first CM it
finds if multiple CMs implement a protocol.

Perhaps the protocol abstraction is something which MC should take care of. Do
you have an API in mind for manipulating CM priority?

I suspect that most of the time, the user will not care which CM is being
used, but distributors may want to tweak priorities.

We could use a .protocol file to contain information such as which icon to use
for the protocol, a user-readable name (potentiall localised) and a list of
CMs in priority order.

-- 
Dafydd