[Gossip-dev] Telepathy Status

[Dafydd Harries]

Ar 11/10/2006 am 13:39, ysgrifennodd Martyn Russell:
> Dafydd Harries wrote:
> > Ar 10/10/2006 am 17:20, ysgrifennodd Xavier Claessens:
> >> Le lundi 09 octobre 2006 à 21:23 -0700, Eitan Isaacson a écrit :
> >>> * The "register" parameter flag could be used to determine the
> >>> sensitivity of the register button.
> >> I didn't though about it before but MSN doesn't support registering. So
> >> I guess the register button should go to the protocol-specific widget.
> >> If I understand how telepathy works we set the "register" param to TRUE
> >> and then connect the account and gabble will first register then connect
> >> the newly created account ?
> > 
> > Note also that not all Jabber servers will support registration. I think GMail
> > still only allows registration via their website, for instance.
> 
> Telepathy should not provide the "register" ability if you can not
> register. That is a broken feature IMO. If there is a parameter to
> register, we will show the button - otherwise, how do we know?

The problem is that Telepathy cannot know itself. In the Jaber case, this is
because we don't know whether the server supports registration before we
connect to it (we can then look for <feature var="jabber:iq:register" />). How
does Gossip currently deal with the situation?

The only real way I can see of fixing this is by separating authentication
from connection in the Telepathy API. I image this would look something like:

connection = gabble.RequestConnection({'server': 'talk.google.com', ...})
connection.Connect()

if registering:
  if not TELEPATHY_CONN_INTERFACE_REGISTER in connection.GetInterfaces:
      raise RuntimeError()

  connection.Register({'account': 'foo at gmail.com', ...})
else:
  connection.Authenticate({'account': 'foo at gmail.com', ...})

This is quite a significant change in the Telepathy model: a connection can be
connected without being authenticated. However, now is not an opportune time
for us to make a change; perhaps after we finish spec 0.14.

-- 
Dafydd