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List:       kopete-devel
Subject:    Re: [Kopete-devel] Contact List overhaul
From:       Martijn Klingens <klingens () kde ! org>
Date:       2002-06-03 7:45:44
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On Sunday 02 June 2002 23:40, Till Gerken wrote:
> I would like to suggest to take a look at the current trends and
> established (and well working) procedures that others have come up with:
> clearly the trend is to do things server-side. This has plenty of
> advantages, I don't think that I have to recap here. Pretty much the
> only disadvantage is that you cannot see your contacts when you are not
> connected yourself, but what good is an Instant Messenger if you are not
> online? We are not trying to build an Email client, this is purely a
> messenger. What good would it be for a cell phone to call people offline
> and relay a voice message once you are in reach of the next hub? Truly a
> unique and cool feature, but not that important (or useful).

I'm talking more about contact list management. I'm not sure all protocols 
know the ICQ concept of 'hidden', in which case being offline is the only 
alternative.

But there are a few far more important issues to be considered here:
1. Integration with the KDE address book (which I want for Kopete 0.6 after 
0.5 introduces these basics) is close to impossible with contacts being 
exclusively server-side.

2. Overriding properties that cannot be stored on the server would be 
impossible (like assigning a meta contact to a contact for example)

Several others are not hard to find. All in all enough reason to take a deep 
breath and go through the hassle. I don't want to ignore the server side list 
or even make it a second-class list, I just want to have a local cache that 
can store all meta information the server cannot and provide the persistency 
the server cannot.

> If synching MSN contacts takes 6 seconds on a broadband line, either the
> protocol or its implementation sucks. 120 contacts can easily be fit
> into a few packets, even with the lowest MTU, it should hardly be
> noticeable.

Sure, but have you ever tried creating 120 KopeteContact instances and adding 
them to the list? Like Ryan said that is what takes the real processing time, 
but it is quite noticeable. The raw socket work indeed is fast enough.

> This may sound like a shameless plug, but Jabber is about the most
> recent development in IM protocols, and it is really _very_
> thought-through. It has so truly unique features that are, in all
> aspects, the same development that the step from POP3 to IMAP4 is.

Too bad none of my friends even knows about jabber, let alone they are 
actually using it, rendering jabber completely and utterly worthless for me. 
Maybe I should add a jabber account for the kopete developers and other unix 
people, but most of the time it won't be suitable for me.

Martijn

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