[Telepathy] Account and AccountManager objects

[Alberto Mardegan]

Hi!
   Some comments about Simon's proposed accounts API, to be found at:

http://people.collabora.co.uk/~smcv/accountmanager.html#org.freedesktop.Telepathy.AccountManager

- About RequestPresence: "If we expect clients to care about changes to 
the requested presence...". YES WE DO! :-)

- Groups/tags: as they were in Zdra's proposal, the API was quite simple 
that IMHO it doesn't require a separate interface. I would just add them 
to the basic Account interface.

- Also, SetPresenceOnGroup might be useful.

- The FindAccounts API as it was in Zdra's proposal is extremely useful 
for clients, I would add it now.

- About the account parameters: "To get the complete arguments to 
RequestConnection, clients must also look at the PresetParameters 
property." and "Clients can obtain the mapping that would be passed to 
RequestConnection by taking a copy of the PresetParameters property, 
then merging in the values from the Parameters property, overwriting 
existing values if necessary." are both going to be wrong. We already 
have in NMC the possibility to compile in some "provisioning plugins" to 
provide the account parameters on the fly; so, for this new API, at some 
time we will want to specify an API for "parameter plugins" to provide 
the account parameters (all of them, of just a few to be merged); these 
could be the password (for a GUI plugin), some connectivity parameters 
(IP address or other networking hints) or just any parameter.

- As I read the IRC logs, Robert was proposing to have a separate 
interface for that part of the API that makes sense only for the valid 
accounts; I don't have an opinion about that, but I have an opinion that 
RequestPresence and RequestChannel (together with all the relevant 
properties and signals) should be together in a same interface.


BTW, I didn't find any documentation about DBus object properties, other 
than a mention to a exported_properties field in the DBusGObjectInfo 
structure. How do they work? Does dbus-glib automatically exposes those 
GObject properties that are listed in the exported_properties field?

Ciao,
   Alberto

-- 
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