[Gossip-dev] Nokia released Mission Control

[Martyn Russell]

Tomasz Sterna wrote:
> Dnia 10-03-2007, sob o godzinie 12:42 +0100, Xavier Claessens
> napisał(a):
>> Basically the MC is a layer on top of telepathy that manage accounts.
>> This allow to make a very small separate UI program for each aspect of
>> an full IM client. For example we can have one program to manage
>> contact
>> list, one for private chat, etc.
>>
>> The big question here is: Do we keep GossipJabber backend ? I think it
>> won't be possible to keep a no-telepathy backend if we want a good MC
>> (and desktop) integration, or at least it will need more work and I'm
>> not sure there is still developers that have time to take care of this
>> (old) backend. 
> 
> Could we use MC to manage not only telepathy but also Gossip (and other)
> accounts? Perhaps extending MC to do it and submitting it back.
> 
> I'm no big fan of telepathy. It's nice, yes.
> But it also bounds us. We cannot do and experiment with things that
> telepathy does not handle (yet). It also depends us hardly on something
> we don't fully control.
> 
> Gossip is a nice Jabber (XMPP in future maybe) client. One of the
> nicest. Dropping backend support in favor of telepathy would make it
> just another telepathy frontend.

Thank you, and that is one of the the aims of the project. To be nice
looking, easy to use, etc. If you feel that way, we should be doing
something right - and we hope to continue this.

I have been sitting on the fence for a long time with Telepathy. I have
no doubt in its merits and abilities but I am really just trying to make
up my mind, should we drop the Jabber backend for Telepathy. What makes
this decision hard is, without Telepathy Gossip is useless in that case.
Say we want to put Gossip on Windows - can we do that with Telepathy? Or
even on MacOS?

What we or I have been doing wrong all these years is basically
abstracting the whole contacts/presence/etc libgossip layer to work with
multiple protocols, Mikael originally started doing the abstraction to
make the code simpler to maintain. I think it wasn't a good idea and it
hasn't done much for us at all, most of that code will be redundant if
we choose Telepathy and drop the Jabber backend, and likewise, if we
decided to do the same but for Jabber. This is my fault, I think I
thought I could do it nicely and have backends written to just plugin.

When it comes to Telepathy, I am afraid that I agree whole heartedly
with Mikael, really I think that it would be best in many ways to just
write new smaller apps from scratch and perhaps to begin with have them
all in an umbrella tarball called Gossip. In my UI experience, the most
important thing is keeping the complicated parts out of the way of the
UI, i.e. having the telepathy operations somewhere and keeping the UI
code clean. We can still do that I think with the work that Xavier has
been doing.

So I have been thinking about how to reuse all the experience we have
gained and things we have fixed/implemented in Gossip to make sure we
don't make those mistakes all over again. What I have considered is
putting common widgets into a library which we can call on and use where
necessary. Short of that, it should be very simple to just create simple
stand alone applications to do what we want.

What I am still pondering over is, do we keep the Jabber backend and
make Gossip able to build in the event Telepathy doesn't exist/isn't
installed/etc. I don't think we have the man power realistically to do
it and will probably end up dropping it, which will be a shame.

>From my experience with the patches and comments on #gossip (IRC) it
sounds like Telepathy has been carefully thought out and has some good
advantages to libgossip in the way things are managed and the events
that are emitted. We always seem to be playing catchup in libgossip to
fix things up to work nicely with Telepathy, and that is where we spend
a lot of time at the moment, which shouldn't be the case. We should be
writing nice, cool UIs with highly usable interfaces and nice desktop
integration - but have we had time for that? NO.

As for the MC release, that's is all good, but this really just
highlights ANOTHER problem I have seen coming for some time and not
really known how to deal with. That is that we have 'n' places where we
store our details on the desktop and there is no ONE place. Well at
least we have the gnome-about-me dialog which tries to solve that any
way and we are currently doing work in Gossip with Fillipo to try to
make the intergration better. However, the accounts information in
Gossip is something that you can configure in gnome-about-me, Gossip,
(does evolution have this input somewhere I can't remember?), and now
MC. I am not sure that using MC from the Nokia device is the best way
forward, but then I haven't looked at it enough yet to comment properly.

This week I will be discussing all these things with Mikael and Richard
and come up with a clear direction for Gossip and roadmap.

/martyn-dump :)

-- 
Regards,
Martyn