[Telepathy] improvements to avatar and aliasing interfaces

[Alp Toker]

Alberto Mardegan wrote:
> ext Dafydd Harries wrote:
>> Our preferred solution is as follows: add a method similar to 
>> RequestAvatar,
>> but that returns immediately, and causes a signal to be emitted with the
>> avatar data at a later point. Drawbacks: might wake up clients that 
>> already
>> have the avatar contained in the signal. This can be mitigated by
>> disconnecting from the signal when you don't have any avatar requests 
>> pending.
>
> It's not clear to me if you also intend to leave open the possibility 
> for the CM to send more than one avatar in the same signal.
> I'd say the signal should be able to carry an array of avatars; if one 
> account has many contacts, sending them in groups might help performance.
>


Is there much evidence that the overhead of one signal per avatar is 
significant enough to make this worthwhile? I'm concerned that this 
could lead to unexpectedly large allocations per message (particularly 
on mobile devices) -- it seems healthier to shuttle the avatars 
individually from the CM to the application, keeping in mind that a 
message containing even a single avatar is already larger than most 
other messages on the bus.