kikidonk

Telepathy Mission Control for the GNOME DesktopSynopsis--------Telepathy lacks an appropriate "Mission Control" to be completely usable as adistributed desktop component. Mission Control is the telepathy jargon for defining thepiece of software dictating the policy of instant messaging (and audio/video)on the desktop, as well as keeping track of connections.Project Details---------------The mission Control must answer these questions:* What telepathy connections are open?* Sign on/off to all accounts/account x for me* Get me a text/voice/video channel with person XIt must also know where to retreive all setup accounts settings (ie. gnome-keyring, gconf, file,..)And finally it must handle incoming requests (incoming text channel, video channel,..) andhandle conflicts (receiving two phone calls, using the camera with one active conversation, and a new one is incoming)To setup the mission control the preferred applications capplet can be modifiedto indicate preferred chat/video/voice channel handlers that will be activated by the mission control.This leads to modify dbus' .service files to include a mechanism to associate services withan interface they provide, and linking to .desktop files, so one could parse the services and geta meaningful description of programs capable of handling dbus interface x. For example:liferea.service:  Service=RssReader.liferea  Executable=/usr/bin/liferea  Desktop=/usr/share/applications/liferea.desktop  Interfaces=RssReaderThis would also benefit epiphany for example where we can't use dbus-activation because we don't knowwhich rss reader is present on the system.Deliverables------------- The DBUS API of the mission control- The mission control implementation for the gnome desktop, including  - The dbus-activated daemon  - A capplet to setup accounts (possibly in about-me)  - A capplet to choose preferred channel handlers (possibly in preferred application capplet)- A new library or a modification of libgnomedesktop or libdbus-glib, that allows to  read dbus .service files, create a list of all applications capable of handling dbus interface X.Schedule--------Normally the three month allowed by the google summer of code project should be enoughto analyze, develop and implement this project.I'll be able to work on this project during the two month of the summer starting the 1st july(right after the Guadec). I won't be able to do much except self-documentation andstudying the existing code, because of the exams taking place from 6th june to 24th june.- begin-15 july, the dbus API and a basic prototype.- 31 july, a robust implementation and the .service modification is finished- 1 august to EOSoC, implementation of the various cappletsIf time allows, i'll also continue to update the Cohoba client (see bio) to makeuse of this mission control so a complete product can be published atthe end of the work.Who Am I?---------I'm an engineering student in computer science at the UCL in Belgium(Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve), finishing my fourth year (5 years in total).I'm a GNOME contributor since a year, starting with little patches and extensionsfor applications such as epiphany, beagle, rhythmbox, then i wrote the Deskbar Appletthat I also maintain as part of the GNOME desktop.I got involved in the telepathy community quite recently, and started writing a clientfor it, codenamed Cohoba which will be further developped as time allows betweentwo courses.I know and program in java, C# and python since 2 years, and have a good understandingof the foundation libraries of the desktop (gtk, gnome*, glib).I'm submitting this proposal in case I wouldn't be selected as mentor for GNOME this summer,I can then do student work, as the conflict would be resolved.