Implement Avatars correctly wrt MSN Content Roaming
Submitted by Simon McVittie
Assigned to Telepathy bugs list
Description
Currently, the Avatars interface copes with two types of avatar support:
-
Server-stored (e.g. Gabble): you push your avatar to a central server, and everyone else pulls it from the central server. When you disconnect and reconnect, your old avatar is still there.
-
Transient (e.g. Salut): everyone pulls your avatar directly from you. When you disconnect and reconnect, you have to "re-publish" your avatar (that is: our client pushes the avatar to our connection manager, so that other people can pull the avatar from our connection manager).
For the moment, we've agreed that telepathy-butterfly should follow the second model.
However, MSN does in fact have centralized avatar storage - it's just that only the owner of the avatar can download it! Edited IRC transcript:
13:45 < smcv> asabil: am I right in thinking that the following hypothetical
scenario is a reasonable caricature of how MSN behaves, with more
familiar protocols substituted?
13:46 < smcv> in a hypothetical protocol called NSM, other users get the avatar
from us directly
13:46 < smcv> this means if you sign on to your account from two different
computers, the second doesn't have the avatar that was set by the
first
13:47 < smcv> so as a workaround, you email the avatar to yourself whenever you
set it
13:47 < asabil> lol
13:47 < asabil> that's exactly it
13:47 < smcv> and when you sign on on a different computer, you grab the most
recent avatar from your mailbox with IMAP, and set it
13:50 < asabil> smcv: that's almost it
13:50 < asabil> just do a s/IMAP/SOAP/
We're not sure how the Avatars interface should represent this.