A lot of good presence work was done on Galago today. Presence feeds can now return a list of presences for the user sent to it, which is useful on such things as IM. Say, for example, a program requests presence for user ChipX86, but neglects to specify a service or source account, since it just doesn’t care. The feeds can now return lists of presences, containing, say, Yahoo and AIM presences.
So I got tired of playing with a test presence feed, and wrote a plugin for Gaim that would provide presence information. So far, it’s working rather well, except for the fact that Gaim’s current concept of status royally sucks. I’m working on it, but am having difficulties creating an easy to use API that handles status exclusion. I talked to Kevin Stange, and he suggested using slots, which could work.
So, with that concept, protocol plugins would define one or more slots, each with an exclusion boolean flag set to TRUE or FALSE. Status types would be registered into a slot. The typical status types, such as Offline, Online/Available, Away, Extended Away, etc. would all go into an exclusive slot, while status types such as Mobile, would go into a non-exclusive slot.
The idea is to have this covering all aspects of status. The state of the user, what the user is connecting from (cell phone, etc.), and anything else. Not everything would have to be displayed. There will be type hints used for that, and prpls can still specify what to show. However, there will be a lot more flexibility in what kind of states can be chosen. Available messages will be doable for protocols that support them, for example.
Also, this will be core/UI split, which has been needed for awhile.
I should have status done within the month, if all goes well.
Depending on what happens tomorrow with my girlfriend, I may or may not start the galago-gtk widgets module in CVS. If I get something really cool, I’ll post a screenshot.