Jabber vcard icons

[Paul Aurich]

And Mark Doliner spoke on 08/10/2009 02:44 PM, saying:
> This might be a recent change.  It might only be in trunk and not yet
> in a release.  It looks like it is intentional.

It is intentional, though the behavior is not new (the prpl now goes to
more of an effort not to re-send the vCard to the server when there is no
change). The behavior is also mirrored in useravatar.c (which is where the
'PEP' avatar is set).

>  My question is,
> should it be?  I kind of see the rationale for wanting to have a
> different icon in each location where you log into your jabber
> account, but you really only have one vcard, and it is meant to
> describe your person, not your location.  It seems like Pidgin should
> inherit the vcard icon from the server, instead.

That image is one of the two main ways the prpl supports distributing the
user's buddy icon and detecting a buddy's icon and, for many people, the
only way.  The two methods supported are XEP-0084 (User Avatar) and
XEP-0153 (vCard-Based Avatars).

The former is the newer standard of the two, although it requires the
server to have PEP enabled (Personal Eventing via Pubsub, in short, allows
pushed updates to contacts who care about the updates).  I'm unsure what
percentage of servers have it enabled and deployed, but I doubt the
majority of users have access to it (jabber.org had it enabled at one
point, but had to disable it because of stability issues; google talk does
not support it). For data from a year ago, see
http://www.process-one.net/en/imtrends/article/rich_presence_support_on_xmpp_network/

> 
> What do other people think?
> 

I'm mostly neutral; I personally use the same image everywhere, so it
wouldn't have an impact on me, except...

I am concerned this would lead to confusion from users, as don't they
expect their currently set buddy icon (as displayed at the bottom of the
buddy list) to be what others see when they log in?

~Paul