[Galene] Upcoming changes to Galène's protocol: user states

[Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr>]

Dear all,

I've just had a chat with Alain (Galène's UI guy), and we've come to the
conclusion that we need some changes to the protocol.  I thought I'd run
them through you.

First of all, the UI needs to distinguish between users of different
categories -- ops against ordinary users, as well as perhaps have
a distinguished "speaker" during seminars and lectures (who might or might
not happen to be an op).

Second, we need some way for a user to signal their state.  The obvious
case is the "hand up" or "in queue" state, where a user requests attention
from the speaker.  This could be shown as an icon next to the user in the
user list, or perhaps the speaker could have a dedicated window with
a list of users in queue.

The user data structure already has a list of permissions (op, presenter,
etc.).  The first step would be to add a second list, known as "states",
which is controlled by the user itself and is not interpreted by the
server; the user themselves can change their states at any time.

The user's permissions are not currently known to other users.  The second
step would be to extend the "user" message, which is used to populate the
user list, with two new fields, "permissions" and "states", which indicate
the permissions and states, respectively, of a user to all the other
users.  Whenever something changes, a new "user" message (of kind "change")
would be sent to all users.

User states would not be interpreted by the server (just as userMessages
are not), which would allow extending the frontend without further
modifications to the server.  The first application would be hands up, but
some frontends might want to add moods or traditional states (busy, away, etc.).

I'm not sure if user polls can be shoehorned into that framework, and how.

Are there any other usage scenarios that I'm missing?

-- Juliusz