[Gossip-dev] Bug fixing

[Martyn Russell]

On Wed, 2006-07-26 at 17:23 +0100, Robert McQueen wrote:
> 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 

You are far too modest ;)

> 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.

I have yet to look, sorry, I just came back from Holiday. I will get to
it as soon as possible.

> 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 agree, this makes much more sense and gives better control from a
client's perspective too.

> > 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.

I did make a branch, but that was _BEFORE_ the last release and _BEFORE_
the SVN move we just had. I need to move Gossip to SVN first and then
branch again.

I have yet to try the patch too, mostly due to time.

> >      - 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.

I agree, if we can provide a solid client that uses it then bugs will be
found and it will become stable quicker, hopefully :)

> >      - 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* :)

*looks blankly* I really need to research this stuff some more and start
with Eitan's patch.

> >   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?

Mmm, this is an interesting one. I think this was recently fixed in
Loudmouth IIRC. It should probably be done by each protocol backend or
centrally in Telepathy somewhere either way, this should not be done in
Gossip IMO.

> >   3. Bug 119885 – Support PGP messaging
> > (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119885)
> > 
> >      - Is anybody working on this?

Not that I know of.

> > 
> >      - 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.

I kind of agree. Ideally, it should be done in Loudmouth from my point
of view (again removing all responsibility of the actual messaging and
stream implementation from Gossip to the protocol back end).

> >   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.

I actually researched this as part of my GUADEC presentation. Currently
Gimmie _ONLY_ works with GAIM. It uses DBUS to talk to GAIM I believe
and gets the presence information via Galago. So in theory it shouldn't
be much work to it working with Gossip. There shouldn't be any work
needed in Gossip for this, just support added into Gimmie.

-- 
Regards,
Martyn