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

[John Gilmore]

> > Many activities are calling PS get_preferred_connection() ...
> > 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 ... 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.

Is there any reason why utterly local activities, which the user has
never shared, are hooking themselves up to a sharing API?

(Perhaps this is one of the reasons for slow activity startup?)

I suggest that activities never think about, or talk to, or even
import, the presence service or Tubes or Telepathy or anything --
until the user actually hits "Share" on the activity.  That would fix
this bug.  It's probably too intrusive a textual change for update.1,
though.

A less intrusive change might be for get_preferred_connection to
make itself a nice no-op if the activity has never been shared.  And
push its work into the next likely call (which would happen after
the activity DOES get shared).  This would let the activities only
crash after someone tries to share them, which would be much better
than crashing every time you run 'em.

	John

PS:  Does this stuff all work with a WiFi access point?  Have we considered
turning off the mesh for update.2, thus avoiding melting down the mesh?