[Telepathy] Telepathy and the shell presence picker (was: Telepathy/Empathy improvements for Gnome Shell)

[Danielle Madeley]

Restarting this conversation.

On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 10:47 +0100, Guillaume Desmottes wrote:

> > > • make Empathy change the user's presence based on the session state;
> > 
> > There have been a lot of discussion about this (the most recent was on
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=617207 ) and we were still
> > not sure what was the right way to do it.
> > a) Shell's session state applet pokes MC to change the presence
> > b) gnome-session pokes MC to change the presence
> > c) Empathy listen on gnome-session state and change presence accordingly
> > d) MC listens on gnome-session state and change presence
> > e) ...

> > Ok, so you seemed to go for c). This seems a bit weird to me; isn't that
> > the wrong way to do things? There have been some discussion that Emapthy
> > shouldn't do the idle detection and auto-away thing but let MC does it.
> > This solution seems go to the wrong direction in that regard.

Since Mission Control is the D-Bus service for setting the user's
presence, I think the correct answer is (a).

As for the other options:

        (b) This could also happen, but it means gnome-session either
        make raw-DBus calls, or gains a dependency on tp-glib.
        
        (c) This is what happens now. However, since you don't actually
        have to run the Empathy roster to be connected to IM, or even be
        chatting (remember Empathy is a set of processes that are a View
        of Telepathy) it seems like the wrong place to me.
        
        (d) Mission Control is meant to be reasonably platform
        independent.

Alternatively:

        (e) A small program could exist to bridge the gnome-session and
        Mission Control presences. It's about 15 lines of C or 10 lines
        of Javascript.

-- 
Danielle Madeley
Software Developer, Collabora Ltd.                  Melbourne, Australia

www.collabora.co.uk