[Gossip-dev] New IRC account widget

[Guillaume Desmottes]

Hello

As announced, I'm trying to give some love to IRC support in Gossip. I'm
writing a new configuration widget for IRC accounts.
You can see what it look like on
http://cass.no-ip.com/~cassidy/files/brol/gossip-irc-1.png

I designed this UI using my previous experience in xchat-gnome and
trying to keep it as simple as possible. Most of users just want to
"connect on FreeNode" and don't care about servers and other technical
stuffs. That's why I put these in a separate dialog.

We need a way to preset most common IRC networks. I consider to use a
XML file to do that. It will look like something like that:
http://cass.no-ip.com/~cassidy/files/brol/irc-networks.xml
Users can define their own servers and modify existing ones. So, we'll
have a system wide file and, optionally, one in user's home.

Gossip doesn't manage multiple servers like xchat does (if the first
server doesn't respond try the second...), that's not a problem, we
could just use the first server in the list and ignore the others.
However, I'd like to keep this UI as generic as possible to be able to
reuse it for any potential IRC GNOME Telepathy client.
To avoid to modify gossip's accounts.xml we could copy in it the first
server of each configured network.

I also need a way to retrieve the network associated with a specific
idle account (for editing purpose mainly).
I see at least 2 ways to do that:

 - For each idle accounts, we add in accounts.xml something (a new
markup, an attribute...) containing the ID of the network associated.
It's the more natural solution but we have to add an IRC specific
option. I'm not sure if it's a big problem or not.
 
 - We don't modify accounts.xml and search the network using the server
recorded in accounts.xml.
 
Comments and ideas (about the UI and the account stuffs) are welcome. :)

Thanks

	G.

-- 
Guillaume Desmottes <cass at skynet.be>
Jabber <cassidy at jabber.belnet.be>
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