Description
This interface contains functionality which we intend to incorporate into the Channel interface in future. It should be considered to be conceptually part of the core Channel interface, but without API or ABI guarantees.
If we add new functionality to the Channel interface, libraries that use generated code (notably telepathy-glib) will have it as part of their ABI forever, meaning we can't make incompatible changes. By using this interface as a staging area for future Channel functionality, we can try out new properties, signals and methods as application-specific extensions, then merge them into the core Channel interface when we have enough implementation experience to declare them to be stable.
The name is by analogy to Python's __future__
pseudo-module.
Properties
ConversationID — s
A unique identifier for the conversation represented by this channel, allocated by the connection manager. This property is immutable.
If the value of this property is non-empty, it MUST be unique to this channel, even over time (implementations MAY allocate and use a UUID, for instance).
If this property is empty or missing, clients SHOULD treat the channel as if it had a conversation ID distinct from any other channel, for instance by generating a UUID locally and using that as the conversation ID.
Unlike the object path of the channel, this property is guaranteed to remain unique over time.
Because this property persists with the channel, if a logger crashes and is restarted, it can tell that a channel that still exists is the same channel that it started to log before crashing.
In particular, clients can safely assume that each pair (ConversationID, Message_ID) uniquely identifies at most one message.
This property is also useful to identify an anonymous conference channel (as used in MSN connection managers), which has no other means of identification.
Bundle — o
The ChannelBundle.DRAFT to which this channel belongs.
A channel's Bundle property can never change.
Older connection managers might not have this property. Clients (particularly the channel dispatcher) SHOULD recover by considering each channel to be in a bundle containing only that channel, distinct from all other bundles, which has no additional interfaces.