[Telepathy] Telepathy integration plans

[Dan Winship]

On 01/15/2010 12:07 PM, Guillaume Desmottes wrote:
> I'm not convinced than using Notifications for everything is the way to
> go. I'm a bit afraid to have to modify Empathy heavily to use
> notifications in a non-standard/hacky way and so break notifications
> with non gnome-shell desktops.

We absolutely have no intention of breaking empathy on non-GNOME-Shell
desktops. As I mentioned before, you would be able to use
notify_get_server_caps() to see if you were talking to a
GNOME-Shell-like or non-GNOME-Shell-like notification server, and adjust
behavior accordingly. In some cases, you could simply provide the extra
hints unconditionally and they'd just be ignored in the non-shell case.

And this difference between shell and non-shell behavior is desired even
if we're using Telepathy instead of notifications, since if we're using
Telepathy to get conversation notifications, then we'd want empathy to
not send libnotify notifications at all, regardless of the current
preferences, because they'd always be redundant.

> I'd like to avoid to introduce
> gnome-shell specific code to Empathy if possible.

I understand that. But at the same time, we want strong integration
between the shell and empathy (or at least, *some* Telepathy-based app
external to GNOME Shell). Eg, when a user's avatar is visible in the
message tray, there will be some action the user can do to bring up the
corresponding empathy chat window/tab for that user.

Perhaps most of these things could be done with D-Bus APIs.
("uk.co.collabora.Empathy.PresentChatWindow"?)

> We are currently working on implementing the different mission control
> interfaces to allow a better separation of the different Empathy
> components and allow external applications to properly integrate with
> Telepathy.

Maybe it will make more sense for us to use Telepathy when those APIs
are done then.

> Maybe I misunderstood the scope of the recent change and you still plan
> to do all of that. But I'd be a bit more confident if we'd all share a
> clear view of the goals we want to reach in term of Telepathy
> integration inside in the shell and how they will be implemented.

Part of the problem is that we still don't have a complete spec of what
the messaging workflow in the shell is. (Eg, exactly what do we expect
the user to do from within the shell UI, and what do they have to go to
empathy to do.)

But anyway, we are not opposed to using Telepathy, it's just that for
the UI we were implementing last week, Telepathy was just getting in our
way (by duplicating the notifications Empathy was already sending, which
covered 100% of what we wanted to know).

-- Dan