When the network drops while chatting from the plasmoid, the chat is closed and removed from the plasmoid. When the channel closes, it should just say "You were disconnected" and disable the input (and perhaps change the icon too), but leave the chat opened.
I'm not sure if they should. These are supposed to be 'notification like' quick conversations. I'll add an option to 'pin' contacts to the plasmoid later. But if you go offline and thus your conversation ends, it should disappear from the plasmoid too IMHO.
It shouldn't. Consider bad connection and occasional/often connection drops, that causes you to quickly reconnect. Or even simple bug that sends you offline. You instantly lose all your opened chats and thus momentarily loosing data (of course you can open history, but that's just not right). Also please don't solve this by adding "pin" for the chat. One does not necessarily always want to have a chat icon present instead of not-autoclosing. As a real-world use case, see gmail's chat. If you open a chat and set yourself to offline, the chats stays opened. Furthermore, if you loose the chat, you have to go all the way through opening contact list, looking for the contact, opening chat again (and in case you want to see history > 5 last messages, you have to open the log viewer). Please just leave them there, any solution would cause more troubles than it would solve.
I'd say this shouldn't happen as well. Maybe it should hide them if you're offline, but you definitely want them back again when you're online, IMHO. I didn't think this was a feature, I don't know much of the ConversationsModel internals :/.
OK, I can fix this. It's actually just a case of removing some code.
Update; I've dade the code that stops it closing the conversation when the channel closes. We have two sub-bugs to now fix: - 1) Making it reopen on connection changes (copy and paste my awesome code in text-ui) - 2) Making the widget visibly "inactive" when we're offline. We have a property for "valid" in "Conversation". Right now everything looks like an active cat, but you can't send messages (in fact, they'd get "lost". which is really bad) I was thinking of disabling the Text Input and adding a label above the text input "You are offline, you cannot send messages". Any comments on part 2?
s/dade/added.
I think disabling the text input sounds great. The alternative would be queuing the messages, and I'm not sure we want to do that.
Git commit 4642c7fc97df834677894a41dccf6dd557cfedba by David Edmundson. Committed on 29/05/2013 at 00:05. Pushed by davidedmundson into branch 'master'. Merge branch 'persistent_chats' REVIEW: 110683 http://commits.kde.org/telepathy-contact-applet/4642c7fc97df834677894a41dccf6dd557cfedba