[Bug 296867]

[Simon McVittie]

(In reply to comment #87)
> Why is the patch protocol-specific? 

Telepathy does not have any central point where OTR can be done for all
protocols and all UIs simultaneously. We can either do it once per
protocol backend, or once per UI. Once per UI would break the ability to
log OTR messages or have them appear correctly in more than one UI (e.g.
both Empathy and GNOME Shell). Every attempt at implementing OTR in
Telepathy has had the plan to do it once per protocol backend; this
implementation is no different. In practice, like most new features,
everyone prototyped it in the XMPP protocol backend first, because
that's the one that works best.

I think the approach that is most likely to yield results in a finite
time is to get the XMPP implementation high-quality and mergeable first,
then expand to the other protocols; then any implementation mistakes in
the first implementation will hopefully not be repeated, and the rest
will be a simple matter of "pretty much what Gabble did". Using a
library for common code, or adding functionality to libotr, would be
fine too, but that's an implementation detail.

Anyone interested in this could add similar glue to telepathy-haze to
cover the various proprietary protocols (AOL, etc.). It might have
seemed more natural to go for -haze first, but -haze uses libpurple,
which is not really designed for things that aren't shaped like Pidgin,
so it can be awkward to get right and doesn't make a great place for
prototyping. The missing protocol backends after that would be
telepathy-salut for link-local XMPP, telepathy-idle for IRC, and
telepathy-rakia for SIP. I think it'd make sense to do -haze and maybe
-salut. I'm not sure -idle or -rakia is necessarily worthwhile, but if
people do use OTR on those protocols in practice, sure, why not.

(In reply to comment #87)
> Would it be possible to use the same code for the new gnome-chat application
> which will likely replace Empathy?

The majority of the glue between Telepathy and libotr (as exemplified
here by patches to Gabble), and the design: yes, it lives in the
protocol backend(s).

The UI: no, the UI code in Empathy is specific to Empathy. gnome-chat
would need to provide a way to enable/disable OTR and mark fingerprints
as trusted, and to be properly secure, it would need to display the
notifications from libotr in a way that cannot be spoofed by contacts.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/296867

Title:
  empathy needs to support OTR encryption

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