Re: [Evolution-hackers] Regarding GAIM-Evolution integration

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Fri, 2004-08-20 at 10:45 +0000, praveen k kumar wrote:
> Hi, 
>     I am attempting to integrate gaim presence status into evolution as described   
> on http://www.gnome.org/bounties/IM.html#127546. I have a few questions 
> regarding this ---  
>  
>       1. I am a little confused as to where all places the presence icon should be 
> displayed. 
>                  In the message list view will adding a separate column with presence 
> icon suffice or should it be added to the cell corresponding to from field. doing 
> the former seems more sensible since it can also be sorted wrt the presence ?? 
>                  Does message summary mean message list ?? 
>                  Where exactly is the preview pane related to messages which is 
> mentioned in the description.  ?? 

The mail part looks like its listed pretty specifically, you just put it in the mail message view (also incorrectly referred to as a preview pane).  You don't want to add a column at all, it would probably be too expensive to calculate for all messages in a folder.

>                  In the contact editor should the presence icon be added to the four 
> im entry fields??. I feel a better idea would be to add an icon showing only the 
> first online/offline contact.  
>                  In the minicard view where should the icon be added ??. From the 
> description it seems that buddy icon should be added/ but this is already 
> displayed in the preview pane corresponding to the address card. should it be 
> made clickable so as to send an IM message or where exactly should the 
> presence icon be put?? 
It looks like adding some sort of status to that icon is the idea.  either a label under the icon, or some graphical processing on the icon, i guess.  Thats just a suggestion, i just do mail.
        
>       2. Regarding nonblocking I/O for libgaimremote, i feel it will only be required 
> for evolution rather than a separate gaim-remote program and a better way to 
> handle this would be to use a separate thread to handle presence requests in 
> evolution.  
Well depends on if the library supports threaded mode or needs a gmainloop etc.

>                In the To:,CC:,BCC: fields the displaying of icon should be immediate, 
> and putting non blocking IO/callbacks doesn't matter a lot. same for the 
> recipient picker dialog and message view dialog. the time spent by the user on 
> those fields is too less to warrant using callbacks. 
It can't block the ui waiting to do the lookup.  It should add the icon once it knows the answer, but if finding out takes a bit of time it shoulnd't interfere with sending email.

>                When displaying presence icons in list view (message list/addressbook 
> list) or minicard view it is better to put the gathering of presence icons in a 
> separate thread and update the UI as information becomes available for large 
> lists so as not to block the UI.  
>                In libgaimremote a timeout can be added when reading from the 
> socket to ensure that the process does not take long. anyway right now it uses 
> unix sockets and it is very fast any way.  
Again it depends on if the library supports multithreaded access or not.
        
>      3. This is a 10 month old bug report and is still open. Is anyone still working on 
> it/ or is near completion??  

10 months, its just a baby.  I can't recall if we've seen much work on this before apart from the stuff to add the e-d-s fields to support it.  Might have to check the mail archives.