[Telepathy] Account and AccountManager objects

[Will Thompson]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 05:38:41PM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
> - Haze: it's anyone's guess what libpurple does for any given protocol.

libpurple's normalized buddy usernames (which are used directly as
handleses) aren't quite all as insane as you might fear:

Protocols I know about that people actually might use:

* MSN: the account parameter is your .net Passport (or whatever it's
  called this week) ID, so something that looks like an email address;
  normalized handles are the same, lowercased.
* ¿¡Yahoo‽: the account parameter is your username (something like
  "lignojmik"); normalized handles are the same, lowercased.  The Yahoo
  <-> MSN bridge doesn't work in either direction in libpurple as far as
  I know, so I don't know how such contacts look.
* XMPP: the account parameter is your jid, optionally qualified with a
  resource.  (I just remembered this; it's now fd.o bug #14212)
  Normalized handles are the lowercased, resourceless JID.
* AIM: these days, screennames can either be alphanumeric string
  starting with an letter, ignoring spaces and case, or a valid email
  address, or numeric strings, which are ICQ accounts.  The account
  parameter can be any of these; normalized handles are lowercased and
  have whitespace removed.  (libpurple doesn't actually care whether you
  supply an AIM screen name or an ICQ UIN when creating an AIM account —
  it just magically treats it as an ICQ account in the latter case.
  This is probably a bug.)
* ICQ: as above.  (You can talk to ICQ people from an AIM account.)
* Myspace: account parameter is the email address you sign up to myspace
  with.  Normalized handles are either such email addresses, or the
  alphanumeric string "nnnrgh" of a profile URL like
  <http://www.myspace.com/nnnrgh>.  There's normalization from one form to
  the other (I can't remember the direction), which doesn't always work
  (kind of like the protocol plugin in general, actually, but the
  developer has just reappeared so maybe it'll improve!).

Protocols I know about that people (who aren't me and aren't excessively
bored) don't use through Haze:

* local-xmpp: as Salut, except you have to supply an account parameter,
  which is a bug.
* IRC: account parameter is "resiak at irc.freenode.net" (fd.o bug #14213).
  Normalized handles are lowercased nicknames; e.g. "resiak".  The
  inconsistency is undesirable, but no-one uses IRC through Haze.

Protocols I know nothing about:

* Novell Groupwise, SIMPLE (as in SIP), SNPP, gadu-gadu, qq, zephyr,
  Lotus Sametime.  Anyone who has access to the right servers, speaks
  the right languages, or wants to do text-only chat over SIP, feel free
  to be a guinea pig and let me know what you find if you try any of
  these.  (It might be easiest just to sign in with Pidgin and peek in
  your ~/.purple/blist.xml.)

>   The Yahoo!!!1!one prpl has a boolean flag for "am I yahoo.jp or not" -
>   does anyone know whether yahoo.com and yahoo.jp operate distinct namespaces?

Allegedly, yes, they do.  So, maybe we should invent "yahoo:" and
"yahoo-jp:" prefixes, or just present the two variants as two distinct
protocols.

-- 
Will
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