[Gossip-dev] [Telepathy] rework of the UI

[Xavier Claessens]

Le dimanche 10 septembre 2006 à 19:14 -0700, Eitan Isaacson a écrit :
> On Sun, 2006-09-10 at 23:33 +0200, Xavier Claessens wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'm working on the telepathy branch. I think the UI for accounts
> > displays too many information to the user. I don't understand why we
> > can't keep the normal user interface. So I'm cooking a patch which
> > removes
> > 
> >   src/gossip-accounts-dialog-telepathy.[ch]
> >   src/gossip-new-account-window-telepathy.[ch]
> >   ui/telepathy.glade
> > 
> > and merge changes in the normal code. I think there is not too many
> > changes to justify a fork of those modules.
> > 
> 
> I chose to put telepathy ui stuff in separate files because the user
> experience will change fundamentally when the account parameters are not
> known ahead of time. It is probably possible to put ifdefs in the
> original UI, but I am afraid it will be hard to maintain and understand.

Yeah I understand the problem, but for an user point of view it's
impossible to put all options like it does now. I think there is no
other solution than having a common UI with basic options and having
special code for some protocols. We can't have a good UI if it's shared
for all exotic protocols.

There is 2 raisons I suggest to come back to the normal dialogs:

1) Let's say we only support gabble for now, other protocols will
certainly need spedial UI. So there is no reason to have a different UI
for the same protocol whatever is the backend. Except the protocol
chooser itself.

2) If Gossip HEAD moves to GtkAssistant, having those modules forked
will make the move by far more difficult because we would have to make
the move on both modules. In general I think having forked modules will
be difficult to keep the telepathy branch in sync with head. And Having
those modules forked removes some #ifdef in it but add lots in
gossip-app.c for example, so I don't know if we have a real benefit...


For account parameters in a GHashTable I understand the problem which is
we don't know what kind of informations should be saved in the account,
but ignoring GossipAccount's properties will certainly lead to many many
bugs. What I suggest:

Removing all GossipAccount's properties and add this API:
	gossip_account_get_property (GossipAccount* account, gchar *property)
{return g_hash_table_lookup (params, property);}
	gossip_account_set_property (...) {...}
To keep the actual API gossip_account_set_*() should uses the hash
table. For example:
	gossip_account_set_resource(account, resource){g_hash_table_insert
(account->params, "resource", resource)}
So we should convert all actual account properties to the corresponding
Telepathy hash table element.

I'll try to continue my patch to reflect this idea and see if it can be
implemented easily.

Those are just suggestions, what do you think about ?

Thanks,
Xavier Claessens.
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