KDE Telepathy Nepomuk questions

[George Goldberg]

2011/4/3 David Edmundson <david at davidedmundson.co.uk>:
> Firstly, a big thanks to George for writing the blog articles about the
> vision of KDE Telepathy.
> For those who don't read planetKDE:
> http://grundleborg.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/the-vision-of-kde-telepathy-part-1-%E2%80%93-the-problem/
> http://grundleborg.wordpress.com/2011/04/02/the-vision-of-kde-telepathy-part-2-%E2%80%93-the-solution/
> http://grundleborg.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/the-vision-of-kde-telepathy-part-3-%E2%80%93-the-implementation/
> I've spent this morning reading through all the source code, I'm still a bit
> unsure on a few things.
> Most my thoughts are summarised into:
>  - Will we still just access telepathy directly when there's no nepomuk
> additions?

Yes, where that is sensible.

> Example:
>  I just added an "add account dialog" which has a list of all accounts which
> have "canRequestPresenceSubscription" available.
>  I don't see any point in ever storing that kind of data in nepomuk, it's
> not something any other app would want, or something you'd ever want to
> query.

I'm assuming you meant "add contact dialog". If that is the case, then
yes, this should be done directly through Telepathy. Think of it this
way: if you are writing data to Telepathy then do it directly, if not,
there is a very high chance you should be doing things through Nepomuk
(although not certain, e.g. I see no reason why the Accounts KCM
should be Nepomuk aware.

> Or my chat handler (sorry, text-ui) I'm dealing with contacts here (not
> people) as you only care about the state on the interface you're chatting
> on. It seems pointless for me to make a Nepomuk::Contact from my Tp::Contact
> which I have in the channel, then monitor the changes that happen to the
> nepomuk::Contact as it's just a layer of complexity in the middle which
> doesn't give me anything.

At the implementation level, sure, you are dealing with Contacts, but
what does this mean to the user - he/she is talking to another Person.
The Nepomuk integration allows us to make this connection, from a
Tp::Contact to a Person. I'd say this is a perfect example of where
you *should* use the Nepomuk integration in some way.

> ---
> Despite the line "although applications can access the Telepathy data
> directly from Nepomuk" I didn't see any interface to do that (is it just not
> done yet). For me it's quite a big thing, we should never try to "abstract
> telepathy" so you can't reach it, only add layers on top for UI and
> metadata.

It's called the Nepomuk API (in kdelibs). There is no Telepathy
specific API because, again, the entire point of applications being
able to access data direct from Nepomuk is for those apps which don't
know or care about the existence of Telepathy (e.g. KMail).

Hope this clarifies a bit.


--
George