Contact avatars, Summer Of Code & Stuff

[Tobia Tesan]

On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 5:22 PM, Mark Doliner <mark at kingant.net> wrote:

> The projects on our ideas list are definitely challenging, but they
>  should be doable for someone without previous experience with the
> codebase.  In fact, in past years I think this is the more common
> case.
>

Hi, Mark - thank you a lot for your reply.
I see, so... I'm not gonna let this put me off.


>  > I'd like to have the option to display my custom picture (defined in
> Google
> > Contacts) instead of the one defined by each contact.
> >
> > Is there a good reason not to do it?
>
> Sounds like a reasonable thing to do.  I'm guessing you would need to
> use some sort of Google Contacts API and not XMPP?


Very likely.
We are probably dealing with
https://developers.google.com/google-apps/contacts/v3/#contact_photo_management
.
The Google API is apparently a reasonably nice one, too.
(I don't know how nice is Google's handling of API keys - I have heard some
horror stories told firsthand about Another Vendor).


>  If so, I feel like
> this should be a separate plugin rather than part of our XMPP plugin,
> because you're essentially overriding data given to you by the server.
>

Makes sense.

While we are at it, I guess there may be a few other ways to enhance
integration with Google to flesh out this hypotetical "Google Plugin", but
I don't know if they are within the scope of the project or how much sense
they make.

I'm away from home as I write and I don't have a working Pidgin, so if you
have nothing against it I'd try to elaborate more on this Monday or Tuesday.


>  One concern is that this project doesn't feel "big" enough to occupy
> an entire summer.
>

Yes, I know.

I proposed it because it's one of those things that annoy me to death and,
if I could afford the time to do it, I would definitely do it anyway... You
know what I mean :)

Do you think it would be reasonable to either flesh out the idea more (see
above) or combine it with some other "bigger" idea or a number of small
ideas (e.g. "emoticon cache" - which is suspected to be also too small -
plus "easy plugins")?
I don't know about the "gobjectification", it seems to me it may as well be
one of the tasks that require more familiarity with the codebase.

I'm checking out the source from git first thing tomorrow night, but even
after giving it a look, I don't know how well I'll be able to estimate how
much will each feature would take, or, rather, the upper and lower bounds
of each, so I'd love to hear from you guys about what you think is a
"reasonable" size.

Thanks a lot, really.
Everybody have as much of a painless Monday as possible :)


-- 
Tobia Tesan
<tobia.tesan at gmail.com>
I never understood the frequency, uh-uh.
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