[sugar] E-mail, XMPP, and non-Sugar identities

[Guillaume Desmottes]

Le mercredi 30 avril 2008 ? 17:57 -0400, Benjamin M. Schwartz a ?crit :
> It seems that many people would prefer if non-Sugar users could be
> integrated into the interface.  For example, it has been suggested that
> Sugar should provide a mechanism for enabling text chat with non-Sugar
> Jabber users.  Clearly, they cannot participate in arbitrary Sugar
> activities, but perhaps they can send text or files, and stream audio or
> video.  I believe that the Telepathy developers have thought a great deal
> about integrating with standard Jabber when possible.
> 

The communication layer (XMPP and XMPP link local (used by Salut)) is
ready for that. For example, last week I established an audio/video call
between my XO running the video-chat activity and my desktop running
Empathy.

Most of the work is in Sugar:
- Chat should properly handle 1-1 chats and not activity mucs (#6298)
- Sugar should offer a way to add not OLPC Friends (by entering their
JID)
- Sugar should also ask to the user if he accepts a subscription request
- We should display not OLPC buddies (== without key) in the mesh view.

Et voil?! We'll be able to communicate with not OLPC Jabber and XMPP
link local users. For bonus point, we could even optionally use other
Telepathy connection managers (trivial presence-service work) and gain
support of others protocols for free. As MSN (telepathy-butterfly), IRC
(telepathy-idle), SIP (telepathy-sofiasip) and all the protocols
supported by Pidgin (telepathy-haze).
That's the whole point of our Telepathy abstraction. You implement your
UI once and gain support of a lot of protocols just by installing new
connection managers.


	G.