[sugar] TubeSock?

[Simon McVittie]

On Fri, 07 Sep 2007 at 16:15:31 -0400, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
> I have written a bunch of Python code using Sockets, and I am trying to port it
> to Telepathy.  To avoid rewriting, I am considering implementing a python class
> that wraps python's Socket interface around a Telepathy TextChannel.  Is this a
> bad idea?

Bad idea, as worded - Telepathy text channels carry Unicode text in the form
of XMPP (Jabber) or link-local-XMPP instant messages, and are
unsuitable for binary data.

You could write an emulation of (some of) the socket.socket interface
as a wrapper around a D-Bus tube in a *Tubes* channel, however. Each
activity gets a Text channel and a Tubes channel (both backed by the
same chatroom, in fact, but we use XMPP's extensibility mechanisms to cause
Tubes messages to be ignored by clients that don't understand them).

Depending when you want this code to ship on OLPCs, it might be
more suitable for you to use stream tubes, which do, in fact, give you a
real TCP or Unix stream socket to play with (and data passed through it will
get forwarded through the IM protocol transparently). We haven't nailed down
the network protocol for stream tubes yet, or tested the current implementation
much, so we're not supporting them in "OLPC 1.0" (the initially shipped
version early this autumn), but we'll support them in some future release.

For completeness: in some future future version of the Telepathy
connection managers we want to have a third type, datagram tubes
(UDP-like unreliable message transfer), using the same sort of
mechanisms that we currently use for voice and video streaming - because
these won't do packet reordering or retransmission for you, they'll be more
work to use, but will be suitable for developers who care about latency
(e.g. for real-time action games). I for one want to get OpenArena
running over these, although probably not on OLPCs :-)

	Simon