[Telepathy] [Bug 20034] Avatar cache reference implementation

[Guilhem Bonnefille]

Sorry for the noise. I did not imagine that Telepathy has to provide
such interface. Just that Telepathy can focus on IM and delegates the
avatar retrieving to another D-Bus service. This is then the
responsability of the IM client to decide if it needs avatar or not,
and contacts the Avatar service if so.

Concerning caching feature, of course the Avatar service can do this
job: before trying an heavy request, just check in its own cache if
the requested avatar is already downloaded. By this way, as cache
system is hide behind the scene, so any client (Qt, Gtk, Python...)
does not have to worry about.

2009/3/18 Simon McVittie <simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk>:
> On Wed, 18 Mar 2009 at 09:37:34 +0100, Guilhem Bonnefille wrote:
>> Reading this bug, I have a (foolish) idea: what about having a D-Bus
>> provider for avatar?
>
> This is far, far out of scope for Telepathy.
>
>> But we can imagine to add a more complex machinery allowing to
>> retrieve avatars from web services (like gravatar).
>
> ... which you would then have to cache locally to avoid re-downloading them
> every time, and we're back where we started!
>
> Telepathy is an instant messaging framework, not some generic source of
> avatars. The cache proposed in that bug is to store avatars downloaded from
> the instant messaging service, optimizing for the common case (e.g. on XMPP)
> that you are told whether someone's avatar still matches what you have in your
> cache, and this is much, much cheaper than re-downloading it.
>
> If you're an IM client author and you want to do something elaborate and
> complicated involving falling back to gravatars, you're welcome to do that
> instead, either on top of the reference implementation or ignoring it
> completely.
>
> (Empathy will probably use the reference implementation, though :-)



-- 
Guilhem BONNEFILLE
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