[Sugar-devel] File transfer in Telepathy

[Guillaume Desmottes]

Le jeudi 04 décembre 2008 à 13:42 -0500, Greg Smith a écrit :
> Hi Guillaume,
> 
> Thanks for following up on this!
> 
> I collected all the known requirements on this here:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#File_sharing
> 
> [...]
> Comments and questions welcome.

Few comments then.


"Should allow moving an object to any XO visible over the network (AKA
pingable) regardless of whether they are visible in the Neighborhood
(due to bugs in collaboration or someone not collaborating or any other
barrier which does not prevent ping)."

I'm wondering how would be the UI for this? How can I send a file/object
to someone that I'm not seeing?
>From a Telepathy pov, you have to see the contact (as online) to send
him a file. One of the improvement I suggested during my Sugar Camp talk
was to add UI allowing users to add buddy based on their JID (like you
do with your classic IM client). Then if he accepts you, you'll see it
in your neighbourhood view when he's online. That means you can
potentially add any one even if you are not seeing him atm (because of a
bugged shared roster for example).
If that what you mean or am I totally missing the point of this
requirement?


"Should support queuing a file for transfer later. That is, add support
for asynchronous sharing over time : the sharing of an effort should not
require everyone to be online at once."

Do you want a "send this file to Bob as soon he's online" button? Then
it's a pure UI thing, Telepathy (obviously) requiers the contact to be
online when sending the file to him.


"Enable automatic activity downloading for shared activities that aren't
installed on the joining machine".

This would need some design work but should be possible I think.
Basically we need a way for the joiner to say to the initiator "I'd like
to join this activity but I don't have it. Could you send it to me
please?".


I'd like to know exactly which meta data should be available when we
receive an incoming file transfer.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Specifications/Object_Transfers#Information_to_show
contains some.
Especially, I think we should distinct mandatory and optional
informations.


All the others points seems perfectly reasonable and should be doable.


Telepathy uses as much standardised protocol as possible. So maybe it
would be good to add a requirement saying the file transfer
implementation has to use standard file transfer protocol to ensure
interoperability with existing IM clients. That way, Sugar will be able
to exchange files with any other jabber and xmpp link-local desktop
client (as Empathy, Pidgin, iChat, etc).


Regards,


	G.