Re: Demo Ui

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

On Mon, 2006-11-20 at 19:22 +0800, David Adam wrote:
> Hi Philip,
> 
> On Mon, 20 Nov 2006, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> > It's a network manager glib API call that determines this, not tinymail.
> > So it can't be a bug in Tinymail (nor does tinymail print all this, the
> > printing is done by the library itself).
> >
> > Tinymail will default to offline status in case the API said that the
> > network manager installation is invalid. On the demo ui there's a button
> > which makes it possible to force the online status manually.
> 
> Could you explain the rationale behind this? There's plenty of systems
> which don't or won't have NetworkManager installed, though I realise this
> is only a demonstration UI.

The support for NetworkManager is included in libtinymail-gnome-desktop
if and only if you compile with --enable-gnome=yes (which is the default
for the gnome-desktop platform target --with-platform=gnome, which is
the default of the build of tinymail).

Whether or not you want support for NetworkManager is entirely up to the
developer. You typically develop the support for this in your
implementation of the TnyDevice type.

The demo ui isn't an E-mail client. It's a technology preview. You, the
software developer, must create that E-mail client using the building
blocks of tinymail. The support for NetworkManager is ONE SUCH building
block. An optional one in libtinymail-gnome-desktop that is enabled by
default IN CASE you are planning to use the gnome-desktop support (which
is a-typical for tinymail, as tinymail is intended to be a framework for
developing E-mail applications on mobile devices and for embedded
appliances).

NetworkManager is one of those many many switches and possibilities of
the tinymail framework. The fact that not ALL desktops come with
NetworkManager does NOT mean that tinymail SHOULD NOT support it. And
it's NOT because SOME people abuse the demo ui as their E-mail client,
that I should disable the support for NetworkManager by some default.

I repeat, I repeat and I repeat that it's the software developer
creating an E-mail client using tinymail .. who should choose which
implementations to activate and which not.


That is the rational behind it.



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
work: vanhoof at x-tend dot be
blog: http://pvanhoof.be/blog