Don't download avatars (and contact info) until they are requested.
Submitted by Will Thompson @wjt
Assigned to Telepathy bugs list
Description
Rob complained about the amount of data transferred when telepathy-haze signs onto MSN. Part of the problem is that avatars are downloaded regardless of whether they have been requested. Once Empathy gains an avatar cache (or has it already?), it should be possible to expose the underlying protocol's avatar checksum on (say) MSN as the token for the icon, so that it doesn't need to be redownloaded every time.
rlaager thinks that the checksum_for_user buddy property might be the necessary checksum, but doesn't know if libpurple downloads the avatar anyway, but thinks that adding laziness if necessary would be reasonable.