A few weeks ago, I wrote a small rhythmbox plugin in python to update my current Gossip status to show the song being played (with dbus). It's all nice, except that when I quit rhythmbox, I want to reset the status string to "Available" (when Available, and more generally the default string for all status).

Since I can't send a NULL pointer through dbus, I have to send "" as a status string. But this doesn't work since most of gossip code use this:

        if (!status) {
                status = gossip_presence_state_get_default_status (state);
        }

instead of

        if (!status || !status[0]) {
                status = gossip_presence_state_get_default_status (state);
        }

An easy workaround for this specific is to check if the status string is empty in gossip_dbus_set_presence() and pass NULL to gossip_app_set_presence() if that's the case.

But I don't think having an empty status string makes sense anyway, so fixing this everywhere might be better.