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

[John Watlington]

On Feb 14, 2008, at 11:52 AM, Jim Gettys wrote:

>
> 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\

(d) might be the simplest to implement in the required time frame.

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

It sounds like any activity trying to share until either gable  
connect to a server
or gives up and starts salut is going to crash.  This either happens  
on boot or
when a user manually switches networks.

wad