Comment 237 for bug 296867
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#237 |
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73416ba
(Get the code!)
(In reply to comment #87)
> Why is the patch protocol-specific?
Telepathy does not have any central point where OTR can be done for all protocols and all UIs simultaneously. We can either do it once per protocol backend, or once per UI. Once per UI would break the ability to log OTR messages or have them appear correctly in more than one UI (e.g. both Empathy and GNOME Shell). Every attempt at implementing OTR in Telepathy has had the plan to do it once per protocol backend; this implementation is no different. In practice, like most new features, everyone prototyped it in the XMPP protocol backend first, because that's the one that works best.
I think the approach that is most likely to yield results in a finite time is to get the XMPP implementation high-quality and mergeable first, then expand to the other protocols; then any implementation mistakes in the first implementation will hopefully not be repeated, and the rest will be a simple matter of "pretty much what Gabble did". Using a library for common code, or adding functionality to libotr, would be fine too, but that's an implementation detail.
Anyone interested in this could add similar glue to telepathy-haze to cover the various proprietary protocols (AOL, etc.). It might have seemed more natural to go for -haze first, but -haze uses libpurple, which is not really designed for things that aren't shaped like Pidgin, so it can be awkward to get right and doesn't make a great place for prototyping. The missing protocol backends after that would be telepathy-salut for link-local XMPP, telepathy-idle for IRC, and telepathy-rakia for SIP. I think it'd make sense to do -haze and maybe -salut. I'm not sure -idle or -rakia is necessarily worthwhile, but if people do use OTR on those protocols in practice, sure, why not.
(In reply to comment #87)
> Would it be possible to use the same code for the new gnome-chat application
> which will likely replace Empathy?
The majority of the glue between Telepathy and libotr (as exemplified here by patches to Gabble), and the design: yes, it lives in the protocol backend(s).
The UI: no, the UI code in Empathy is specific to Empathy. gnome-chat would need to provide a way to enable/disable OTR and mark fingerprints as trusted, and to be properly secure, it would need to display the notifications from libotr in a way that cannot be spoofed by contacts.