Filtering special messages. Zhone or FSO?

[Sargun Dhillon]

So we really need a filtering extension for FSO. It would be really
nice if this sat on the FSO level rather than the dialer level. For
example, some carriers send out SMS messages with special caller IDs
in order to notify customers of voicemail. Instead of this hitting the
user and them seeing a rather odd looking message, we could capture it
using a "pluggable" app, that would send a newVoicemail signal.

I can think of other things like phone call filtering depending on who
is calling you, or where you are. I understand this would be difficult
to integrate into FSO, as it really isn't the realm of FSO (Blocking
call handlers, and call state setting). Especially if you get into the
area of setting notification attributes, like "If this call is from
_someone unimportant_, and I'm in meeting mode right now, don't ring,
or buzz, but if it is from a contact in list "special" then feel free
to buzz.

This seems like a prime area for the dialer, except if someone writes
a simple application for Zhone, there is no way it's porting to the
other hundred distributions (not that many...yet). Would it be better
to have an entire plugin API to FSO, where dialers can integrate and
bring up a settings tab, etc.. I agree that there may be far too much
abstraction here, but I'm brainstorming out loud on the best way to
write portable applications, with a unified view (UI).

What do you guys think?