[Bug 27269] review and clean up TplContact public API

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27269

--- Comment #16 from Simon McVittie <simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk> 2010-06-10 03:15:08 PDT ---
(In reply to comment #13)
> Empathy log store stores the full name of the contact in the XML, along with
> the id and the avatar id. In each log entry.
> 
> This means that each entry might have a different value for Alias and AvatarTok
> and is a different TplContact.

In that case, another way to model this would be to give each Entry more
"properties" (getters) in its C API, and discard the TplContact object
entirely:

* sender ID (always a contact ID)
* sender alias
* sender avatar token
* receiver ID (contact, or chatroom, or "" if MSN)
* receiver alias (or "" if not a contact?)
* receiver avatar token (or "" if not a contact)

If the IDs are the thing you have to use to understand the relation between
entries, then it seems odd to introduce another object that doesn't have the
right many:1 relationship.

> Originally I was thinking of caching avatar pics also, it's still an idea,
> since it's not the scope of libfolks caching old information.
> If I am not mistaken, currently empathy do some caching.

At the moment, neither Empathy nor telepathy-glib ever expires old avatars from
its cache, so they'll stay in ~/.cache/telepathy/avatars forever (or at least,
until deleted).

> Why keeping avatar and alias in the log entries?
> What does it happen if Cosimo changes his avatar with a funny pic and comments
> with simon his new avatar, then changes it back?
> The context of the log is not just the body, sender and receiver, but also the
> avatar or alias. That's what I call historical context.

Right, I can see the reasoning for doing this.

Note that in MSN, you can attach a nickname to a message that differs from the
nickname you want in contacts' contact lists. We now expose this in the
Messages interface as a header field, "sender-nickname".

In the long term, I think Tpl's log format should be (a serialization of) the
MessagePart[] aa{sv} from the Messages interface, and we should insert the
sender/receiver alias and avatar token into the header part if we want to keep
them (we can reserve some keys for that purpose).

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