[Telepathy] improvements to avatar and aliasing interfaces

[Sami Haahtinen]

On Wed, 2007-05-09 at 12:13 +0100, Alp Toker wrote:
> Alberto Mardegan wrote:
> > 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.

Another possibility would be for the CM or the connection component to
maintain a avatar cache and only pass on the filename to the client.
That way the message would be smaller and it wouldn't matter if there is
just a single avatar or an array of avatars.

The downside to all this is that unless it is the CM that handles the
avatars, there will be a lot of duplicate code in avatar handling. And
on the other hand, it's not really something that the CM should be
doing.

- S