[Decibel] Fwd: Summer of Code 2008 - Call For Ideas

[Tobias Hunger]

On Saturday 01 March 2008, Matt Rogers wrote:
> So you basically want to solve the messaging filter problems that we've
> already solved in Kopete in Decibel again? I understand that this is a
> natural extension, but IMHO, this is something that should be handled by
> the chat application that gets started to handle the message in the
> first place.

Basically we need to solve the "decide what to do with an incoming 
communication request" problem in Decibel: Making that decision in a 
configurable way is a core feature.

That certainly has much in common with problems like message filtering in 
kopete. That is the point: You solved the problem, the konversation guys 
probably did as well, and so did name-your-favorite-communication-app-here 
developers.

> If you have these filters, you'll need to handle how to chain them
> together so that things are processed in the right order, provide a UI
> so that messages that are logged (for example) can be viewed, etc.

Yes.

We need much of that anyway since we want to be able to configure responses to 
incoming (and outgoing) communication requests. We have to deal with 
questions like: Does the user want kopete to handle jabber? How about IRC, 
maybe he prefers konversation for that? What if application X can not handle 
the communication request for whatever reason? Should we try Z then or just 
give up?

So we need to define a order in which applications are queried. We already 
need to chain them together. Extending this mechanism to allow for message 
filtering is (from the decibel server point of view) probably just a small 
change in the already implemented API. It offers a lot of flexibility, so I 
think it is worth the trouble.

> You might as well just port the Kopete messaging filtering API to
> Decibel, but that's just as bad since both versions will still have to
> be maintained, and then we'll get into "Decibel supports this, why
> doesn't Kopete?" crap that we already have with the other instant
> messengers. Sounds like a nightmare to me.

Well, if kopete does support Decibel, then it will support everything Decibel 
does. Sorry, couldn't stop myself here;-)

Best Regards,
Tobias
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