Re: [Evolution-hackers] ESourceExtension and backends... "claimed" generic property ?

[Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com>]

On Tue, 2013-02-05 at 23:00 +0900, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> I know, we've discussed this already a few months ago, it just
> seems like something essential to the extension API, you
> tell the backend to do "foo" and you just don't know if that
> backend knows about "foo" (yet) or not.

Seems like that could be mitigated by the backend capabilities property,
which -- at least for static capabilities -- should be reachable through
the factory APIs and not require an actual backend instance.

The static capabilities of a given backend type are the same for all
instances of that type, if I'm not mistaken.  So it would make sense to
be able to query the factory for available backend types and their
respective static capabilities prior to instantiating one.

ESource and its extensions are meant to be just a dumb data container.
It's used for more than just backend configuration.

Mail signatures nowadays are ESources with a [Mail Signature] extension,
for example, and I'm also considering porting our filter rules and saved
searches to use ESource in a similar manner.

Matthew Barnes