Serious side effect of #6299 (silencing salut so gabble can connect)

[Jim Gettys]

On Thu, 2008-02-14 at 16:58 +0200, Morgan Collett wrote:
> We're testing patches to Presence Service to not start salut (or stop
> it) for a while to give gabble a chance to connect to the schoolserver.
> 
> However, Daf came across what was a very minor problem which becomes
> more serious in light of this change.
> 
> Many activities are calling PS get_preferred_connection() to interact
> directly with the appropriate Telepathy Connection Manager, which was
> required in the past before we expanded Presence Service's management of
> setting up channels for activities.
> 
> However, during the period when we stop salut to let gabble try to
> connect, this call fails as there is no running plugin in PS. If an
> activity is launched during this time (and there's no particular UI to
> show this other than no buddies in mesh view) and it makes this call in
> __init__ as most of them do, then it will crash with a gray screen.
> 
> This affects: Calculate, Chat, Pippy, Record, Web and Write (of the
> activities we bundle) and potentially other non-bundled activities.

Ouch...

Seems like this is something we're going to have to fix pretty quickly
no matter what.

> 
> Our options are:
> 
> (a) Touch all these activities now and port them to the newer cleaner
> API offered by PS/Sugar

How big are the diffs?  Does this simplify the code?  

> (b) Don't do #6299 for Update.1, but do it and (a) for Update1.1

This would be pretty much immediately, anyway.

> (c) Find some way for the call to get_preferred_connection to fail
> gracefully (We can't think of one so far)
> (d) Make a UI change to let the children know not to launch activities
> during this time period

Let me ask a different question: what happens to activities already
running which are running shared?  Are they going to fail?  Presumably,
yes....
                                - Jim


> (e) ???
> 
> Morgan
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-- 
Jim Gettys
One Laptop Per Child