[Telepathy] Porting a Connection Manager from 2.26 to 2.28

[Jonny Lamb]

On Tue, Mar 09, 20:14:49 -0600, Edward Page wrote:
> I find it odd that Empathy 2.28+ only allow 1 SIP implementation.
> Does this extend to any of the other CM's?  If I remember correctly
> for MSN there is butterfly, pecan, and haze.  What is the general
> practice for this?

It's confusing for the user. There are a few solutions:

 1. Display a new item in the combobox for each CM:

      [ msn, sip, sip, jabber ]

    This is obviously extremely confusing. Which sip do you pick?!

 2. The natural fix for solution #1 is to add the CM name after the
    protocol, perhaps only for duplicate entries:

      [ msn, sip (sofiasip), sip (theonevoice), jabber ]

    But, what does "sofiasip" and "theonevoice" mean? Users don't know
    these CMs even exist, let alone their names.

    This is now the mess we have in maemo thanks to there being
    butterfly, pecan and haze in the application manager and when
    adding a new account. In hindsight, perhaps I should have just not
    included haze's MSN in account-plugin-haze in favour of butterfly,
    but in some situations haze is better (although we should just fix
    butterfly). Then again, pecan would then have been added and we'd
    be back to square one.

 3. We define in this combobox source which CMs are better for which
    protocol, and this is exactly what we do in Empathy. For example,
    if we've got gabble and haze installed, we certainly don't want
    to start using haze for our XMPP accounts.

See the widget's source for more specific details in the Empathy case:

    http://git.gnome.org/browse/empathy/tree/libempathy-gtk/empathy-protocol-chooser.c

hth

-- 
Jonny Lamb, UK
jonny.lamb at collabora.co.uk