[Telepathy] Standardising Mission Control

[Robert McQueen]

Will Stephenson wrote:
> If done right it would be another level of indirection, but I don't see any 
> performance requirement in accessing account settings.

Also true. :)

> That said I would dispute the need for a standardised account store.  How 
> often do real users switch desktop environments? 
> 
> 1) Standardised MC APIs decouple MC clients and MC implementations ->
> A) MC UIs can be replaced keeping same MC (and its account storage impl)
> 
> 2) Decoupling an MC from its storage implementation ->
> B) MCs can be replaced without reentering configuration
> 
> IMO A) is a far more frequent and user-gratifying activity than B).  Users 
> happily hop in and out of bed with kmail, evolution and Thunderbird and 
> reenter their mail settings.  Otherwise, a static config migration tool could 
> be provided that would allow B) without the hassle of abstracting gconf and 
> kconfig.

Right, this is what we were saying at FOSTEL in Paris. Standardising the
MC D-Bus API for accessing account info is far more important in the
short term for actually realizing the goals of Telepathy (so any app on
the desktop can pick up a connection and perform some task), whereas
standardising the storage implementation is a lower priority, but might
be nice to do if we can.

> Will

Regards,
Rob