[Telepathy] New ContactInfo interface based on vCards

[Will Thompson]

Hi,

I've been working on a draft[0] of a new ContactInfo connection
interface, which models the information as a slightly structured
representation of vCard data. (Contrast with the old interface, which
represented vCards as... a string containing a vCard. :-)) While vCard
is kind of hairy and suboptimal, it's widely used (both XEPs relating to
contact info are based on vCard) and there's no point in defining
another format only to have to map to and from the vCard semantics in
every CM.

I'm not sure what to do about change notification. I understand that in
XMPP you can either subscribe to contacts' vCards, in which case they
are pushed to you, or not, in which case you have to explicitly retrieve
the cards. Do any protocols exist where you get change notifications but
not the content pushed to the client? I defined flags for both[1], but
the first flag is currently useless. Do we want a vCard token interface,
similar to avatar tokens? If no protocols with contentless change
notifications exist, it would be an unnecessary complication.

Also, in the current draft of the interface RequestContactInfo doesn't
return until GotContactInfo has been emitted for each requested contact.
That feels wrong, but I don't see how it would usefully report errors
for a subset of the contacts passed to it while still succeeding for the
others otherwise.

[0]
http://people.freedesktop.org/~wjt/telepathy-spec-contact-info/spec.html#org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Connection.Interface.ContactInfo2
[1]
http://people.freedesktop.org/~wjt/telepathy-spec-contact-info/spec.html#type-Contact_Info_Flag

Thanks,

-- 
Will


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