[Telepathy] Proposed standard MC API

[Alberto Mardegan]

ext Xavier Claessens wrote:
> Is there something about chandler/filters in the standard yet? I'm
> facing a problem with the filter system I pushed into NMC: Empathy
> registers a filter when starting, if I set presence to offline NMC
> quits, if I set presence back to online NMC restarts and don't have the
> registered filter anymore...

Ok, looks like we have to store the filters somewhere...

> I had an idea to merge concepts of chandler and filter together since
> those 2 concepts are really close:
> 
> chandlers are registered by installing a .chandler file describing the
> type of channel it wants to catch and the dbus service MC has to launch
> to handle a new channel. We can permit more than one chandler file per
> channel type, with a priority field. When MC gets a channel it takes the
> most priority chandler and starts it, this chandler is responsible of
> the new channel until it closes it (the channel is then removed from MC)
> or tell MC to dispatch it to the next registered chandler in the
> priority queue, if there is no more chandler MC close the channel.

Mmmm... but under what case would a chandler pass the channel to another 
chandler?

> Like that filters are nothing else than a channel handler with an high
> priority.
> 
> What do you think about?

We are planning to add a "Protocol" field to the chandler files, so that 
different UIs might be started for different protocols. If we unify 
channel handlers and filters at the same level, we might have to add a 
"Protocol" field to the filters too; this doesn't make much sense, in 
most of the cases.
Maybe we can have one low-priority filter for starting the channel 
handler, but I don't see any benefit of this approach over the current 
implementation.

Anyway, do we really want to have MC being entirely controlled by the 
D-Bus API only?
I think that defining some starndard paths and file formats for filters, 
channel handlers, protocols, etc. might be simpler and more effective 
than providing APIs for installing all those.

Ciao,
   Alberto

-- 
http://www.mardy.it <-- Geek in un lingua international!