[Telepathy] TpContact and metacontact

[Xavier Claessens]

Hello,

I discussed with Guillaume how we could start teleapthy-gtk library. The
most needed widget is a contact selector.

We could reuse EmpathyContactSelector and port it to use TpContact
instead of EmpathyContact. But it means we lose a wrapper around
TpContact and that makes impossible to support metacontacts without
breaking API, afaik.

TpContact can't be subclassed and it's not an interface, so I see no
possibility to extend it. It can only be a wrapper for a telepathy
contact handle.

So what should we do? Either:
 - Create telepathy-gtk using only TpContact, then possibly break API
later?
 - Wait until we have a real solution for metacontacts, experimented in
Empathy, then start with telepathy-gtk library? Is it a possibility that
we'll add later something like TpPeople object in telepathy-glib to
extend TpContact and support metacontacts?

I think metacontact and telepathy-gtk are 2 important goals and they
could both take a while before getting something stable. Maybe we should
start planning a bit that work...

Ideas are welcome.

Xavier Claessens.