From LCA2012: Libgravatar support in buddy icons?

[Peter Lawler]

(copied from text sent to devel at conference.pidgin.im MUC)

Hi folks,
Just checking in at 01:50 from Linux Conf AU. Only thing of 'note' today
was some suggestion between myself and Francois Marier (cc'd on this
mail) to have the buddy icon subsystem support libravatar. Discussion
then went on to talking about a standard C wrapper around libravatar and
then on to perhaps an XEP for distributed buddy icon avatar support.
I'm not 100% around libravatar (about as much as I am on the XEP's ;),
but I think it certainly deserves some attention. The current avatar
support in Pidgin in 'all or nothing' or '3rd party' management. Thus,
libravatar seems to me to sit in the middle ground and deserves some
merit and attention to my point of view. Having used Gravatar over the
past few years, it's often bugged me that there's been no Free variant.
Ravatar seems on the surface to fit the bill perfectly.
Thoughts, discussions, etc., are welcome. From that, I'll take it to the
Tracker for us (enhancement, built in or plugin, or external plugin
[suspect the Guifications folks may be curious about 'testing' it out
first via the pluigin back, shall see once discussion takes place here]
or upstream to be XEP kind of foo.

(I'm expecting to be knee deep in Kernel and EFI for Tuesday's program
at LCA, not sure what else I may turn up)

Regards,

Pete.