[Telepathy] Proposed standard MC API

[Sjoerd Simons]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2007 at 05:21:09PM +0300, Naba Kumar wrote:
> Hi Sjoerd,
>
> ext Sjoerd Simons wrote:
>> Which makes you fall into the trap of deciding which chandler is best. If 
>> i got
>> say 3 telepathy clients installed (GNOME, KDE, something else?).. Each 
>> will
>> install their chandlers, so now a text channel comes in.... Which one 
>> should be
>> started by the MC?
> That same problem exists for mime-type handling and has been solved. We can 
> do something similar. If MC can not resolve the request to a unique 
> handler, either it picks up the one which has been set as 'default' 
> (somehow) or picks up anyone of them (it doesn't matter because all of them 
> are equally capable of handling the request).

They might be equally capable.. But not equally integrated with the rest of
your desktop. If your running GNOME you want the GNOME chandler to be spawned
normally, not the KDE one.. I think for mime-types that's solved because the
application spawning the mime-type related application has some information
about for which ``desktop'' it is meant. While MC implementation should
potentially desktop independant.


>> By explicitely telling the MC over dbus what the chandlers are (or in 
>> which dir
>> they are) for you session your basically working around this problem.
>> In practise i think there will always be a managing entity in the users
>> session (for example a presence applet). So i don't think this is really 
>> an
>> issue.
> I think you still hit the problem with that approach. The managing entity 
> would need to figure it out.

Correct but now the problem lies with the managing entity, which should have a
better view about which chandlers are the ``best'' for your environment.

>> An extra question for the proposed API:
>> Say i'm a happy empathy user and this being the future, so assume empathy 
>> does
>> supports voip. And there is thus a chandler registered for VOIP by 
>> empathy.
>> Now i start up some magicall sip specific (branded?) client.. Which wants 
>> to
>> take over (all?) sip calls from empathy. And thus wants to install it's 
>> own
>> chander that _overrides_ the current ones for SIP streamed media channels.
> At least for protocol specific overrides, it can work (.chandler just needs 
> to mention specific protocols that MC should prioritize the handler for). 
> For prioritizing within the same protocol, I don't know. I don't see the 
> point either.

My question was mostly about overriding specific protocols. I'm not really sure
if there is a big use-case for overriding within the same protocol either.

  Sjoerd
-- 
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having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well
burst out in laughter.
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