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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: a desktop wide "presence state" handling
From:       Tobias Hunger <tobias () aquazul ! com>
Date:       2006-12-21 10:07:47
Message-ID: 200612211107.51843.tobias () aquazul ! com
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Hi Anarky!

Nice to see somebody thinking on this topic!

Since Decibel was mentioned (and Aaron poked me, even before I got round to 
read up on kde-devel;-) I should speak up.

On Wednesday 20 December 2006 20:25, Anarky wrote:
> I've been told about Houston/Decibel, but it seems to me that it's more
> about other people, not about the current user of the computer.

Decibel does manage your real time communication accounts (IM, VoIP, etc.) and 
has a presence state for all of the accounts it knows about. So far it does 
not have a global presence: It should be possible to bring up accounts 
independent of each other. It is trivial to extend Decibel with some applet 
that does update the presence information of all accounts at once though.

> I've also read somewhere that an idea of Phonon was to allow to lower the
> volume of your music when an entering VoIP call comes in.

It should be easy to wire this up using the Decibel framework: Decibel's 
daemon (Houston) can detect incoming connection attempts and will trigger 
actions based on the type of the connection.

> That's a typical 
> use case I would like to address. So, if I get somewhere, it would be
> interesting to see if the two things can be integrated.

Triggering screensavers, etc. is out of scope of Decibel.

I see two approaches to get on from here:

* Have Houston (Decibel service Daemon) raise a signal whenever a presence 
state changes.  We would not need a presence service then. You could argue 
that the presence in Decibel is tailored to communications settings 
(following the usuall offline/away/busy/free for chat pattern) which is more 
limited then what you are proposing. As I said, Decibel has no "global 
presence" so far, but this could be added.

* Have Houston grab the global presence state from someplace else. I was 
planning on having an applet to do just that, but this could be a presence 
service just as well.

> I would also be happy if someone else is interested by this project and
> wants to help, give advice, etc ...

It would be nice if we could discuss this some more. We definitely need to 
work out how to work together.

I for one think having categories is overdoing it a bit: Presence is a pretty 
straight forward concept which should have a *simple* implementation or many 
users will just not bother with it.

I am not overly fond of your categories: They allow to have one central place 
to set up reactions to presence state (which is nice), but limits what you 
can do, too. If there is no category for something, then you are stuck.

Wouldn't it be simpler to have some existing service send a D-Bus signal with 
a IM-like presence state (maybe including a message) and have interested 
parties listen for that, "translating" the event as they see fit? Muting can 
be done in the mixer then, stopping playback in the music player, etc. I'd 
for one would find that more logical as a user. It is not really intuitive 
that I have to look in a presence configuration dialog to have my music not 
stop whenever I am idle for a while! I'd check the configuration of the music 
player first...

Best Regards,
Tobias

PS: I hang out on freenode.net, feel free to chat me up there (nick is hunger) 
if you have questions on decibel (or join #decibel;-)

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