[Sugar-devel] update on the collaboration refactoring

[Tomeu Vizoso]

Hi all,

have just updated the page were I've been tracking my work on the
collaboration infrastructure.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Collaboration_Refactoring

For this release the main change is the removal of the Presence
Service API in favor of directly using the Telepathy API. This makes
the code more maintainable because the presence code is separated from
the sharing code. It also means that activities are now closer to work
on non-Sugar environments and also the other way around. It also
prepares the terrain for landing in future releases the features that
are outlined in the page above. Finally, we'll be saving a few
megabytes of memory which will be useful in the XO-1 and other
machines with limited memory and in thin-client environments.

Another important change is the use of Telepathy's Mission Control
APIs, which removes a good chunk of custom logic for managing
connections and reacting to incoming channels. This will be needed in
the future when we want to use other protocols such as MSN, ICQ or
send SMS messages through a 3G modem and for interacting with contacts
from outside the school (for the deployments that wish to do so).

Activities using the sugar.presence API in sugar-toolkit should
require no changes, which to the best of my knowledge means all
activities except Etoys, as it calls the PS D-Bus API directly. Have
pinged about this the Etoys developers during the last weeks without
success, so I gave a look to the Etoys sources to see what would
entail these changes. My conclusion has been that it would take me
more time than we have until feature freeze, so unless I manage to get
some help from squeak hackers I'm considering leaving a modified
Presence Service that would be activated only when Etoys requires it.
Then Etoys would be ported to use the Telepathy API in a later moment
if its maintainers see it fit.

Any ideas, comments?

Thanks,

Tomeu