[Telepathy] Standardising Mission Control

[Alp Toker]

We have the situation right now where Decibel and Mission Control do 
many similar things in different ways.

I wanted to get discussion going on how we might start to standardise 
the D-Bus APIs and formats used internally by these implementations to 
allow for greater interoperability.

Some possible desirables:

    * Client/service separation: Allow for lightweight client
      implementations by doing as much work as possible in the service.
      This would mean having D-Bus API not only for for accessing
      accounts but also for manipulating account details.
    * Standardise the account store format to ease migration between
      desktop environments and possibly even mobile devices.
    * Avoid monolithic interfaces in favour of smaller ones that deal
      with individual roles eg. account management,  unified contacts,
      unified presence. Implementations with specific needs can then
      concentrate on the features they need to support.


My preliminary investigations have shown that Decibel is closer to these 
goals, while there is more code behind mission-control and it has been 
deployed widely, albeit on embedded devices. Both code bases are large 
enough that standardisation will not be trivial.

I'd like to hear what the authors of these components and their users 
see as a possible future direction that brings these frameworks together 
and lays groundwork for future implementations.