Re: [Telepathy] Telepathy/Empathy improvements for Gnome Shell

[Guillaume Desmottes <guillaume desmottes collabora co uk>]

Le jeudi 11 novembre 2010 à 22:15 +0000, Will Thompson a écrit :
> Hi folks,

Hi Will; thanks for this detailed mail.

> • hide the tray icon if the shell is running and no channels need approving;

Actually, I've been asked to always hide it if the shell is running:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=631944

> • don't approve 1-1 Text channels if the shell is running;

What does that mean exactly ? Atm Empathy implements one Approver
(Client.Empathy.EventManager). When a channel needs to be approved, this
event manager displays it:
- As a notification bubble (with buttons if the notification daemon
supports it)
- In the notification area
- In the contact list

So, if we disable the status icon (cf above) we'll still have the
notification bubbles and the contact list change. Is that ok ?

(Actually that's not true because the notification bubbles are currently
implemented with the status icon but that's an implementation detail, we
should be able to easily separate them).

> • make Empathy change the user's presence based on the session state;

There have been a lot of discussion about this (the most recent was on
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=617207 ) and we were still
not sure what was the right way to do it.
a) Shell's session state applet pokes MC to change the presence
b) gnome-session pokes MC to change the presence
c) Empathy listen on gnome-session state and change presence accordingly
d) MC listens on gnome-session state and change presence
e) ...

> Unrelated to conversations: there's a presence picker in the menu that 
> appears when you click your name. It doesn't offer the full range of IM 
> presences: it's for general desktop presence. If you're Available, 
> notifications get shown to you etc etc; if you're Busy, they hide until 
> you mouse to the corner. The general opinion seems to be that if Empathy 
> is running the user should be signed in (unless they pick Offline, 
> obviously) and if it's not, they shouldn't. So Empathy would listen to 
> the session's state change notifications (between Available and Busy, 
> and the implicit change to/from Away) and update your Telepathy status 
> accordingly. If the user picks Invisible or Away or whatever in Empathy, 
> then this should take priority over the session state.


Ok, so you seemed to go for c). This seems a bit weird to me; isn't that
the wrong way to do things? There have been some discussion that Emapthy
shouldn't do the idle detection and auto-away thing but let MC does it.
This solution seems go to the wrong direction in that regard.

> Finally, Empathy's full name in its desktop file should be changed to 
> Chat. The design is that applications that are part of the desktop 
> platform (like File Browser, Calculator, etc.) should always have 
> unbranded names, and applications that sit on top (such as Firefox, for 
> instance) should have branded names. Empathy is considered part of the 
> desktop.

That's https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=631476

I'm still unsure about this. We recently splitted the text handler to
its own process (empathy-chat) so the "empathy" binary is now purely the
contact list; renaming it to "Chat" seems a bit weird as the chatting
part is actually done by empathy-chat.

Atm, empathy-chat doesn't any UI when it's manually started (it just
display chats when handling text channels) but we could imagine adding
one at some point.


Regards,



	G.