[Telepathy] Mission Control's crash handling by other Telepathy components

[Pedro Francisco]

Hello!

This was verified on Empathy 3.4.2.3 .

I'll detail some caveats with the current handling of Mission
Control's crash by other Telepathy components.

User-side description (Empathy window is open and visible):
1) Mission Control crashes
2) Empathy continues to show people online
3) people talking to user do NOT trigger respawn of Mission Control
4) interface shows user online, others see him online, but the user
does not receive message from others (and he gets offline once he
tries to speak to others, I think)

Workarounds: various ways to respawn Mission Control:
* /usr/libexec/mission-control-5 (best)
* setting a different status in Empathy (MC seems to get in an
inconsistent state, will crash again 'soon', some accounts will not
connect, etc.)
* killall /usr/bin/empathy; empathy (closing the window will not work,
I think; only using Chat > Quit; I'm unaware if this triggers a
unstable Mission Control being spawned)


Issues here:
* messages are not received by the user after MC crash
* user interface deceives the user into thinking all is well
* even after spawning a new Mission Control (via changing status in an
already opened Empathy window), the probability of Mission Control
crashing is higher, as said above (I don't know why; should be the
same if launched via D-Bus activation or via command-line, no?)
* every Empathy/Mission Control crash interaction freezes the desktop
(I'm assuming due to the high amount of D-Bus messages exchanged, so a
simple crash freezes whole desktop for a 1 or 2 seconds, one or two
times per crash)
* when Mission Control is run manually (e.g., script, user typing on
the console /usr/libexec/mission-control-5) the connection for all
accounts will be set to offline status unless "mc-tool autoconnect
ACCOUNT_ID on" has been run before.


I hope the above analysis is of use :)

-- 
Pedro