[Gossip-dev] Bug fixing

[Robert McQueen]

Jaime Frutos Morales wrote:
> I'm new to this list, so HI YOU ALL!

*ducks and covers ears* Hi. I've been lurking here too, but I'm a
Telepathy kinda guy so I'm here to see if I can encourage you all in the
right direction. :)

> I've just sent my patch for the bug #137800
> (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137800) and I hope it will
> me accepted.

Not too familiar with gossip code, but from an end-user perspective,
setting the status to online and then immediately to invisible or away
can result in unwanted messages. Telepathy's spec is changing so that if
you have advance knowledge of what statuses are valid (eg you had a
status for this account last time round) you can set a status from the
offline state, and sign in directly with that status. Make sure the same
is done where possible in Gossip.

> I'm looking forward to improving Gossip, so I'm interested in these
> bugs and I have some questions about them:
> 
>   1. Bug 346201 – Telepathy integration
> (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=346201)
> 
>      - Is anybody working on this?

Eitan Isaacson (eeejay) has done some preliminary work to hack it
together, which I have the patch for, but I've not looked at it. I think
Martyn made a branch in CVS where this can be worked on.

>      - Should we wait until Telepathy matures?

Telepathy works very solidly already for Google Talk and Jabber stuff,
and we've already got the advantage of Google Talk voice calling. It's
production ready - it's used on the Nokia 770 for these features.
Avatars and file transfers are being worked on, as well as a lot of
other protocol backends in the pipeline. I think what we really need now
is a client which people can use to play with Telepathy, and hence
encourage work on the backends.

>      - How should it be done?

Some code should read the .manager files to work out what protocols (ie
connection managers) are available from Telepathy, and present those as
available in Gossip's account configuration. Then you just put the
connection managers online for the connections you want, and off you
go... *some detail omitted* :)

>   2. Bug #325002 – support of dnssd/zerconf chatting support
> (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=325002).
> 
>      - Should it be solved now or is it better to wait for Telepathy
> integration?

We've got several people who want to do Telepathy backends for this (or
patch our existing Jabber backend, it's not clear which is the best
approach). I'd concentrate on Telepathy support and then this kind of
thing will be done for you. :)

>   3. Bug 119885 – Support PGP messaging
> (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119885)
> 
>      - Is anybody working on this?
> 
>      - Isn't it solved with Telepathy integration?

Telepathy hasn't proposed a solution for this. I know one thing - in my
eyes it should be possible for the connection managers to drop their
filesystem access (or never have it, eg with selinux) after they've
loaded, so key encryption shouldn't be done using something inside the
connection manager. At the base level, we need to support advertising
your key and willingness to receive PGP'd messages, and an interface to
send and receive the encrypted message blobs. I'm open to interface
proposals for these.

>      - Should it be solved in Loadmouth or in Gossip?

I agree with Micke that it's something which should be done at a higher
level than what Loudmouth currently presents. Either Gossip, or some
as-yet undesigned Telepathy component could take responsibility for
encrypting/decrypting the messages.

>      - Should it be solved using Seahorse and D-Bus or using
> libgcrypt/gpgme ?

I'd prefer to see a call out to a process which already had an
infrastructure for prompting the user for their GPG passphrases etc,
rather than us having to develop a new one. We could perhaps define an
interface for a "encrypts and decrypts your messages for you" service,
and inform the connection manager about this service when wishing to
have an e2e encrypted IM session.

>   4. Gimmie support for Gossip (from Guadec BOF)
> 
>      - Is anybody working on this?

I wouldn't bother doing any more tight coupling between desktop
IM/presence components. I'd prefer to see support for the generic Galago
and Telepathy frameworks go into Gimmie, so that whatever client you're
using you can get people, presence and conversations. We already have a
feed for Telepathy presence into Galago, and so does Gossip, so work
done on Gimmie with Galago will have immediate benefits.

> Thanks in advance for your answers.
> 
> Jaime Frutos Morales

Regards,
Rob

-- 
Robert McQueen
Director, Collabora Ltd.