[sugar] Issues with the presence service

[Dan Williams]

On Sat, 2006-07-29 at 14:05 +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> Dan Williams wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-07-27 at 11:43 +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> >   
> >> - There are places where I want to pass services around through dbus. We 
> >> should use paths for this right? I couldn't find a way to recreate the 
> >> objects other than the protected _new_object though.
> >>     
> >
> > That's intentional.
> >
> > Just use the object path of the Service that the PS returned to you.  I
> > removed the service serialization stuff because the Service's object
> > path is essentially a pointer to the service, and that's what you send
> > to the PS to have it operate on.
> >   
> I'm not sure to understand this.... The use case is:
> 
> 1 I have a sugar.presence.Activity in the shell
> 2 I want to pass it to an activity (different process) through dbus. I 
> currently do this with activity.object_path().
> 3 From the activity process I want to call sugar.presence.Activity 
> methods (get_id, get_services etc). To be able to do it I need to 
> 'recreate' the object from his path. And I'm doing it using _new_obj.

Ah, I understand.  Two ways, like you suggest.  In both cases, the other
Activity process needs to have a PresenceService object (from
sugar.presence.PresenceService) created for itself.

Solution 1:
Pass the object path from the Shell to the other activity process
through dbus (use type 'o' for object paths rather than type 's' so they
get validated correctly).  Add a "get()" call (or something like that)
to the sugar.presence.PresenceService object that creates the
Python-wrapped D-Bus object, and return it.  Pass the object path into
get().

Solution 2:
Just pass the activity ID, and then call the
sugar.presence.PresenceService's get_activity() method.  However, this
isn't generic and therefore there's no easy way to get a Service or
Buddy object, for example.

I vote for #1 I guess.  There's a benefit to making IPC and RPC
dead-easy for kids to do, but there's a minimal level of complexity with
IPC/RPC anyway that we simply can't cover over.

Dan

> What is the correct way to do this?
> 
> I possibly misunderstood your comment in irc about using object paths... 
> maybe the activity_id should be used for this instead?
> 
> Thanks,
> Marco