Extra KDE Telepathy modules moving to Extragear

[David Edmundson]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 2:42 PM, Kevin Krammer <krammer at kde.org> wrote:
> On Sunday, 2012-04-29, Martin Klapetek wrote:
>> On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 22:44, Kevin Krammer <krammer at kde.org> wrote:
>> > On Saturday, 2012-04-28, George Kiagiadakis wrote:
>> > > No, the classes that wrap GObjects do not need a d-pointer. All the
>> > > calls are forwarded to the underlying GObject and if for any reason we
>> > > ever need to save extra data on the wrapper class (which is highly
>> > > unlikely), we should use the GObject qdata for that. Wrapper classes
>> > > may be destroyed and re-allocated by QtGLib and therefore they
>> > > shouldn't hold any data.
>> >
>> > So the GObject has a d-pointer?
>> >
>> > Any specific reason there is a GObject at all? My very basic
>> > understanding of
>> > Telepathy was that it is D-Bus based services.
>>
>> Telepathy is based on D-Bus services, however this is about Telepathy
>> logger [1], which is a GObject-based implementation of a central logging
>> Telepathy component, which does not use D-Bus for sending the logs as it is
>> quite heavy data and D-Bus for this purpose is rather slow, so it provides
>> a direct access API.
>
> The documentation you linked to seems to be quite of of date (most of the
> links in it don't work), so I would still need some clarifications.
>
> The document claims that the logger is an independent service, i.e. it says:
> "Telepathy Logger is a session daemon".
>
> I quite don''t understand the term direct access API in the context of a
> daemon.
>
> Usually daemon refers to a separate process. Communicating with a process is
> to my best understanding never done by linking the daemon code into the client
> applications.
>
Yes, starts whilst you're chatting. Closes when you're done.
>
> My best guess so far is that there is some library that provides read-only
> access to files the independent logger writes onto disk.
>

Your guess is effectively correct. Telepathy-logger is a bit more
complex as it writes to and reads from multiple backends.
XML files or SQLite and it also reads (read only) Pidgin log files as
their way of importing old log files.

>> Our telepathy-logger-qt, which we want to move to
>> Extragear, basically just wraps the original logger into Qt-like API, so
>> that it can be used with Qt/KDE apps easily.
>
> Based on my guess I would strongly recommend to put the wrapped GObject into
> the wrapper's d-pointer. Otherwise your only way of ever implementing that
> natively is to name a struct GObject and use that as the native
> implementation's d-pointer, making it very hard for any using application to
> link with any library exposing GObject symbols.
>
If we ever implemented it natively I would make so many other changes
to the API that I would bump the major version number and not even try
to keep compatibility.

> Cheers,
> Kevin
>
>> [1] - http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Logger
>
> --
> Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
> KDE user support, developer mentoring