Jabber vcard icons

[Mark Doliner]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 7:38 PM, Peter Saint-Andre<stpeter at stpeter.im> wrote:
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> On 8/10/09 7:59 PM, Mark Doliner wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 6:16 PM, Richard Laager<rlaager at wiktel.com> wrote:
>>> On Mon, 2009-08-10 at 14:44 -0700, Mark Doliner wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>>>
>>>> What do other people think?
>>> I don't know anything about the Jabber protocol, but if we "inherit the
>>> vcard icon from the server", how does a user change their vcard icon?
>>
>> You would have to set the icon while you're logged in.  Which means if
>> you try to set it while you're not logged in, your change is lost,
>> which is sad.
>
> What exactly is sad? How could you upload a modified icon if you're not
> online? That's no different in XMPP than in HTTP (you can't do an HTTP
> POST if you're not connected to the Internet!).

Oh, yeah, I wouldn't expect the XMPP server to be able to accept an
updated icon when you're not online.  The sad part is that Pidgin's UI
lets users set an icon when they're offline.  So my original
suggestion has some problems.

Current behavior:
Local icon takes precedence.  When you sign on, if the icon on the
server differs from the local icon, then the server icon is replaced
with the local icon.  This is true for both vcard and XEP-0084 icons.

Behavior I proposed originally:
Server icon takes precedence.  When you sign on, if the icon on the
server differs from the local icon, then the local icon is replaced
with the server icon.  This would happen for both vcard and XEP-0084
icons, with XEP-0084 icons taking precedence over vcard icons.  The
problem with this is that Pidgin has a "master" icon setting that
applies to all your accounts, with the optional ability to set a
different icon for each account.  We couldn't really change the
"master" icon.  We could save the icon from the server and set it for
an individual account, but I don't think users would be very happy
about this.

So our current behavior is better than what I had proposed.  But yeah,
this is a problem for Meebo, where users generally don't want to erase
the icon in their vcard when they sign on.  We've modified the jabber
prpl to only update the icon on the server if the local icon is
non-NULL.

-Mark