Re: Desktop Session Presence Manager

[Martyn Russell <martyn imendio com>]

Alex Jones wrote:
> Hi list

Hi :)

> I'm starting to hack on a little utility that sits on the session bus
> emitting signals to alert any interested applications of session
> presence updates. The idea is that all applications that are interested
> in doing magic things when the user is "away", etc., no longer need to
> have their own code for dealing with it, and that the user does not have
> to set themselves as "Gone to the shops" in more than one application
> (IM clients being the obvious case).

Hmm, sounds like Galago, as others have said. Currently there are a
multitude of ways to do this.

1. Listen to Galago.
2. Listen to Telepathy.
3. Request state from your brand of IM client (Gossip allows this over
dbus and I am sure GAIM does too).

> My idea is to take the simple concept of the Gossip status icon and put
> it into this new app. 

Sounds like Peekaboo (part of Gossip).

> Of course, this isn't the only way to set status,
> as any app on the session bus can manipulate it. 

This is the only difference really.

> This includes cases
> such as Metacity, which could temporarily set the status to Busy when
> running a full-screen application (of course this would be configurable
> via Metacity's own options).
> 
> Perhaps one day, the functionality of this application could be merged
> into GNOME Session or something.

I am not sure this is a good idea. These sort of things should be like
building blocks added together IMO, there is no need to merge it into
the GNOME session.

> Does anybody have any comments on this idea? Does anybody see anything
> negative about this approach?

All in all, it sounds just like another implementation of what
Gossip/GAIM/Telepathy already do, I don't really see any "value add"
here as they would say in the business world. I think the point you are
trying to make is that it should be the ONE thing that is central that
ANY application talks to, but considering there are currently a bunch of
choices out there already and Galago seems the most obvious for people
to use, it isn't likely to be taken on my applications.

Sorry to sound so negative.

If there is any feature to add here, I think it would be best added to
Galago.

If you want to see how things are inter connected (at least how they
were when I did my GUADEC presentation last year) WRT IPCs, Daemons and
applications, see pages 24/25 of my talk:

http://www.imendio.com/files/guadec2006/Martyn-IM.pdf

-- 
Regards,
Martyn