Hi guys, Tobias Hunger wrote: > Basically Decibel is a high level wrapper around telepathy and its > communication backends. So far I am not aware of any SMS communication > manager for telepathy, so Decibel will not be able to send SMS messages at > this time.
There are two I'm aware of. Some time ago, Raphael Slinckx worked on a proof of concept called telepathy-blue in Python, but I can't find much trace of it on-line any more, and I have a suspicion it'll be quite bitrotted now. More recently, Bastien Nocera has been working on making the backend SMS functionality from gnome-phone-manager available as a UI-independent telepathy-phony backend, which can be used from Decibel just as easily as Empathy & Nokia Mission Control. The code is in GNOME SVN, and some details are here: http://www.hadess.net/2007/11/new-gnome-phone-manager-and-telepathy.html If you don't want to communicate directly with a phone, then writing a backend which interacted with a web/XMLRPC <-> SMS gateway would be very feasible and I think a valuable addition to the stack. > I have to admit that I have not thought too deeply about SMS sending yet. > > The challenge will be mapping SMS to the telepathy APIs. Those assume that a > communication channel is established between two (or more) people and > messages are send down that channel. SMS is basically "fire and forget", with > each message being disconnected from each other. There is no established > channel of communication. It might be possible to treat a sequence of SMS > messages as some "virtual channel", but when will you be able to close that > channel? There are many cases where Telepathy synthesizes a channel to represent something which doesn't necessary have a concrete existence in the protocol. Any IM protocol which is message rather than conversation based, which includes XMPP, AIM, IRC, etc is just synthesizing a Telepathy channel which represents any messages sent to/from a given person. This seems a reasonable approach to also take in a SMS backend. More generally, Telepathy has unresolved issues about when it makes sense to close a channel. In the case of a chat, when you close the window that has the message view in it seems a reaonable time, but discussions on IRC havn't yet yielded a reasonable solution for when to close a file transfer or tube negotiation channel which contains multiple transfers which have been negotiated by/for different programs or are displayed in different places in the UI. Answers on a postcard... :) > Best Regards, > Tobias Regards, Rob _______________________________________________ Telepathy mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/telepathy
