Re: empathy integration with the desktop

[Danielle Madeley <danielle madeley collabora co uk>]

It's very important here to distinguish between Telepathy as a service
and Empathy which is providing the views of that service.

If the shell wants to sign the Telepathy accounts in, it's quite easy to
do that, it just needs to make the appropriate D-Bus call and it will
happen. Once the accounts are signed in, appropriate components (i.e.
the shell's text handler or Empathy) will be launched in response to
requested/incoming channels.

So if you want to go online automatically, simply design what that will
look like in the user interface and make it signal mission control that
you wish to go online.

On Tue, 2011-03-29 at 10:09 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:

> In order to go online and have the integrated stuff work in the
> background you must first start a weirdly named application ("Empathy")
> and then close(!) its window (this will not actually quit the app). This
> causes you to go online and start using the integrated messaging
> systems.

The app is a view. We could make it quit the app. We could also make it
not automatically put you offline (which it does at the moment when you
quit). Really the only reason not to quit the app is to save having to
load all that state again next time you want the roster (chat and video
calls are in separate processes). Once again, the communications itself
are a desktop service and separate to the app.

> We could automatically launch empathy by default on login, but people
> might not like to automatically go online as soon as they are at the
> computer.

To reiterate, not actually required. Just talk to mission control.
Mission control will launch UI components on demand for
requested/incoming channels.

Summary: Telepathy is a communications service, Empathy is a view of
that service. It's like how you don't have to launch nautilus to carry
out file operations.

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

www.collabora.co.uk