[Telepathy] Spec meeting notes on Mail Notification interface

[Nicolas Dufresne]

Le jeudi 21 janvier 2010 à 11:03 +0000, Simon McVittie a écrit :
> However, the Messages interface already has a similar data structure
> (which
> can also deal with more complex messages).

I've read the Telepathy.Channel.Message interface. It's about half
similar and half different. But at the end I'd prefer if we stick with
our own type in MailNotification. Here's some point that keeps me away
from the Message interface.

- It's in Telepathy.Channel.Interface.Message. This is not very
intuitive.
- The documentation often refer to mechanic relating to the
implementation of the Message interface which make no sense in
MailNotification context and may lead to confusion.
- There exist very confusing key that does not fit mail notification
(like the sender which is a contact handle)
- Attachement, multipart body, images, etc is overkill content for
notification. Even the HTML form is miss-leading since mail notification
does not expect full HTML node but a text with HTML tag (UTF-8 encoded,
doc will soon be more precise on this).

At the end, both types share few keys and the fact that we are using
hash tables for flexibility, but the semantic is different. Using the
Message type would require to re-document everything from the point of
view of MailNotification.

What we can do, is try to keep both type more similar so someone that
has used the Message type can understand quickly the Mail type and
vis-versa. We can use 'content-type', 'content' and 'truncated' key for
the internal message body, we can rename 'id' into 'mail-token' to
create a parallel with 'message-token', we could have a policy to make
mandatory the 'mail-receive' timestamp, etc.

regards,
Nicolas