[Gossip-dev] Avatars+Gossip+Telepathy

[Robert McQueen]

Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> 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.

Telepathy connection managers don't implement caching for avatars,
that's expected to be done client-side. Asking for the avatar off
Telepathy is the same as asking for the vCard on XMPP - they should both
be cached by Gossip. The Telepathy avatar API assumes the protocol has
some kind of checksum or timestamp which will change when the avatar has
changed and indicates that it should be retreived, because I've not come
across any situation where this is not the case.

> 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.

++ I'd also like to know if there are places in the Telepathy API where
you end up dispatching a silly number of method calls, and not being
able to make any progress until they /all/ come back, because these
cases can probably be optimised. One idea we had was a GetHandleDetails
method on the Connection which would take an array of handles and give
you all of the available information in a dictionary, such as the string
version of the handle, any alias, presence, avatar token, etc.

> Best Regards,
>   Mikael Hallendal

Regards,
Rob