[Telepathy] [Bug 20034] Avatar cache reference implementation

[Simon McVittie]

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 :-)

    Simon