[Gossip-dev] Avatars+Gossip+Telepathy

[Mikael Hallendal]

Xavier Claessens skrev:
> Le dimanche 05 novembre 2006 à 17:28 -0800, Raphaël Slinckx a écrit :
>> Hi !

Hi,

>>  * Since we need some persistant storage of the avatar token (to
>> optimize bus transfers) what API should i use to store a contact's
>> avatar ID to disk and read it back on restart. I suspect it involves
>> xml, am I right? Any pointer is appreciated here.
> 
> I think a good idea is to store avatars in PNG files, the name of the
> file can be used to know for which contact the PNG is for. This way
> users can get avatars from (for example)

Even if you cache the avatars on the Gossip end of D-BUS you will have
to send over a checksum to make sure the cached version is still valid.
I think this will just make things more complex with little gain and
that you'd be better off by sending the avatar as base64 encoded everytime.

If it would turn out to be a problem in the future you can always fix it
later.

>  ~/.gnome2/Gossip/<account>/<id>.png
> 
> Another solution is to store it in XML or plain-text file using base64
> encoded.
> 
>>  * This is a general problem in the Telepathy branch, every single
>> telepathy dbus call is synchronous. In the case of avatars it breaks
>> horribly since requesting an avatar is a direct IO operation over the
>> network. The whole branch need to be ported to async calls everywhere. I
>> can do this, but right now i prefer to concentrate on features. When i
>> finish avatars and server-side groups, i will start porting everything
>> to async calls.
> 
> I think for testing sync call can make the job, but sure it isn't
> acceptable for final release.

I think the sooner you can move to async calls the better. Better test
the stuff with asynchronous calls since that is what is going to be used.

Best Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal

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