[Telepathy] MissionControl's spec

[Naba Kumar]

Hi Xavier,

On Tue, 2007-10-23 at 15:25 +0200, Xavier Claessens wrote:
> What's bad with having non-complete accounts? MC can just ignore them
> when connecting... And RequestChannel can return "error: incomplete" for
> example. If we give param flags in GetParameters() client can calculate
> itself if an account is incomplete and do whatever it wants with it. I
> think it's a more natural way.
> 
The accounts list is used by a lot of other components too (not just by
the accounts setup UI). If you include incomplete accounts in that list,
all of them need to filter the list. That's not convenient. And not to
mention if there is no way of distinguishing them, filtering would be
impossible.

Second, AccountCreated and AccountDeleted signals should be emitted only
for usable accounts. Incomplete accounts are clearly unusable. if you
emit the signals for them too, it will add extra overhead of filtering
out noise for everyone connected. Nobody, beyond accounts setup UI, is
actually interested in getting signals/list for incomplete accounts.

Choices look like:

1) Allow atomic creation of accounts only. No need to worry about
completeness.

2) Allow incomplete accounts, but have a method to determine if it is
complete *and* make sure the API interface works only for completed
accounts. You can have extra API to work with incomplete accounts for
components interested in them, such as Accounts setup UI. This is what
currently done in NMC. This allows for example elementary updates in
accounts storage (gconf in current case) and yet get all the signals and
listing work correctly.
Thanks.

Regards,
-Naba