[Telepathy] Account and AccountManager objects

[Xavier Claessens]

On mar, 2008-01-22 at 18:50 +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
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> On Tue, 22 Jan 2008 at 18:59:22 +0100, Guillaume Desmottes wrote:
> > An interesting use case here could be: In epiphany, I click on
> > irc://irc.freenode.org/telepathy . Then 3 possibilities:
> > a) I already have a connected account on Freenode so I just join
> > #telepathy
> > b) I have an account configured for Freenode but it's not connected. We
> > connect it and join #telepathy
> > c) I don't have an Freenode account already configured so we create a
> > "temporary" account (maybe just create a connection is enough), connect
> > it and join #telepathy. 
> > 
> > Not sure how much MC should be involved in this process though.
> 
> I think some level of URI handling is an obvious job for MC, actually, later.
> 
> We could have a /usr/lib/telepathy/uri-handler which just makes D-Bus
> calls to MC, and register it as (the|a) handler for xmpp:, sip:, irc:,
> and whatever mad URI pseudo-schemes the proprietary protocols use.
> Ideally the registration-for-schemes would only be done when you install the
> necessary CM-specific UI bits and the corresponding CM.
> 
> The temporary accounts bit is harder, and needs protocol-specific
> knowledge. It's only suitable for IRC, I suspect.

I think IRC is the only case for temporary accounts. In my plans Empathy
(as a client) will drop support for chatrooms. A dedicated application
looking like xchat-gnome, using libempathy(-gtk) will do that job. By
clicking on a irc://server/channel link "empathy-chatroom
--open-uri=irc://server/channel" get launched by GNOME. That client
checks if an account exists, if not it creates one and enable it. That
special account is remembered by the UI and when the user closes the
channel or the program exits empathy-chatroom is responsible of calling
account.Delete().

What should be kept in mind in MC is that accounts can be
created/deleted often. NMC don't do that right, gconf keys and/or a
directory remain after removing an account IIRC.

Xavier Claessens.