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List:       kopete-devel
Subject:    [Kopete-devel] Contact List overhaul
From:       Andres Krapf <dae () chez ! com>
Date:       2002-06-01 21:47:41
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hello everybody, this is yet another one of my long report mails :-)

on #kopete, Martijn and i have discussed plans to get the latest flashy 
features in kopete's contact list.

so, what are those flashy features ?
 - kopete will store contacts locally, and allow for synchronization with the 
server for groups/contacts/contact info, if supported. there are many 
advantages to doing this: being able to move users while offline, being able 
to change the screen name to whatever we like, etc.
 - contacts can be part of any number of groups, starting from 0 (ie no group 
at all)
 - contacts can be agregated into some "metacontacts", which will represent a 
physical person. for example, if a friend of mine uses msn, aim and icq, i'll 
be able to aggregate those 3 into one "metacontact".

these can be thought of as requirements.
since the overhaul is going to heavily change parts of libkopete, we'd like to 
hear from protocol implementors (or people with good knowledge about the 
protocols): do you want to add requirements ? (does your protocol have 
feature X that needs support from libkopete's contacts and contact list ?)

the contact/contact list overhaul will also attempt to tackle some of the 
issues of the previous design. namely:
 - contacts right now are not good to work with, for a number of reasons like:
   * nobody guarantees that two different pointers are different contacts.
   * nobody currently tracks contact creation and destruction, which leads to 
mighty crashes.
 - more code could be integrated in libkopete.

we also discussed the design for the new contacts/contact list. i won't report 
it in detail, because it still needs some thought... but the important idea 
is that libkopete will take charge of creating, managing and destroying the 
contacts. this will solve both of the aformentioned design issues, and will 
also cover the requirements.

Martijn has kindly offered to do the work. he'll start whenever he feels like 
it, probably soon enough... so if you want to react, do it quickly :-)

thanks for your time,

-- 
Andres
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