[Telepathy] Announce: telepathy-spec 0.99.1

[Simon McVittie]

The “house of cards” release.

This is the first snapshot towards Telepathy 1, a new major version of
Telepathy. It is not usable yet - we're releasing this snapshot so we
have a reference point for converting everything else.

The aims of Telepathy 1 include:

• Don't have many deprecated ways to do the same thing
• Reduce complexity
• Increase agility by making it less painful to add D-Bus API
• Increase agility by making it less painful to break D-Bus API -
  it shouldn't take 8 years to get from Telepathy 1 to Telepathy 2

We're not there yet, but we're getting there.

tarball:
http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/releases/telepathy-spec/telepathy-spec-0.99.1.tar.gz
signature:
http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/releases/telepathy-spec/telepathy-spec-0.99.1.tar.gz.asc

Major changes:

• The top-level namespace org.freedesktop.Telepathy is now the much
  shorter im.telepathy1

• A few interfaces are considered to be "core". After Telepathy
  1 becomes stable, they will only break API in a new major version
  (im.telepathy2):

  · Account, Connection, Channel and other "top-level" objects
  · Channel.Type.Text

• The majority of interfaces are considered to be "extra". If we make
  incompatible changes to them, we'll renumber them (e.g.
  Channel.Type.Call1 might be replaced by Channel.Type.Call2 in future).

• InspectHandles no longer exists, and anything that gives a handle
  should also give an identifier.

• RequestHandles no longer exists, superseded by GetContactAttributes,
  GetContactByID or by requesting a Room channel by its TargetID.

• The Text and Messages interfaces have been turned into a unified
  Text interface, whose API is basically the old Messages interface.

Smaller changes:

• "valid Accounts" are now "usable Accounts" to avoid clashing with
  the idea of proxy objects' validity, or weak pointers' validity

• various data-types related to SimplePresence have dropped the "Simple"
  prefix

• Protocol names and Service names may now contain underscores, but not
  hyphen-minus (so telepathy-salut implements local_xmpp, not
  local-xmpp, while telepathy-gabble now communicates with services
  that include google_talk, lj_talk and windows_live)

• There are no more 16-bit integers, even for port numbers. We use
  32- or 64-bit integers throughout.

• ChannelDispatcher.CreateChannel, EnsureChannel are similar to the old
  CreateChannelWithHints, EnsureChannelWithHints, but they also
  return the ChannelRequest's immutable properties. The versions with
  fewer arguments have been removed.

• Group.MembersChanged now has the same arguments previously used by
  MembersChangedDetailed, which has been deleted.

• ChannelRequest.Succeeded has the extra arguments previously in
  SucceededWithHints, which has been deleted.

• Conn.I.ContactList.ContactsChanged has the extra arguments previously
  in ContactsChangedWithID, which has been deleted.

• Client names may start with underscores

• Access_Control_Type_Group takes a string group name, not a handle.

• AliasesChanged contains a map from contact handle to alias,
  not an array of pairs.

Deprecated things that were deleted include:

• "Telepathy Properties" (replaced by standard D-Bus properties)

• Capabilities (replaced by ContactCapabilities)

• Presence (replaced by SimplePresence)

• StreamedMedia channels (replaced by Call channels)

• ContactList channels (replaced by Conn.I.ContactList,
  Conn.I.ContactGroups) and Handles of type LIST or GROUP

• Tubes channels (replaced by StreamTube, DBusTube channels)

• Many methods of the form GetFoo() (replaced by corresponding
  properties, or by GetContactAttributes)

• ChannelHandler

• HoldHandles, ReleaseHandles

• ListChannels, NewChannel, RequestChannel (replaced by Conn.I.Requests)

• Various interfaces that never got beyond draft status