asterisk users - Aug 2005 - Asterisk hint thing.... what do you do with it?

I'm having difficulty understanding this 'hint' feature of asterisk.

My limited understanding is that it is somehow needed for 'informing'
some kinds of phones that can do shared line appearance to show the
state of the channel/user...
Is this true?

the wiki has this:
http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk%20presence

I'm still having much difficulty getting a basic understanding of what this
is what it does how it works and how to debug/test it to see that it is
working...

:-)

What I'd like to accomplish is to get some snom phones and have shared call
appearance lights go on & off when certain extensions are in use etc.

Is this hint thing what is needed?  is there a way to test it without
actually using a phone that has the shared call appearances?

I tried something like this:
exten => 4300,hint,SIP/4300
exten => 4300,2,Dial(SIP/4300,33,tT)
exten => 4300,3,Voicemail(u4300)
exten => 4300,4,hangup



set verbose to 4 and sip debug on...

I don't see anything different when extensions 4300 is picked up
dialing or connecting a call

however doing a show hints at the CLI shows a state chage from 0 to 1 when
the extension is in use.

Any pointers on how to use/test the hint feature would be greatly
appreciated!!

Take care!

Steve