[Adium-devl] ByObject prefs suck

[Augie Fackler]

[disclaimer: this is my reading day between classes and finals, and  
my email ended up being a weird stream-of-consciousness event.  
Continue at your own mental health risk.]
While trying to track down a weird bug today, I noticed my ByObject  
prefs were freaking huge: 2,030 or so ByObject prefs for *just*  
contacts, not including groups (including metas though).
I nuked all non-group ByObject files and let them regenerate, and now  
the folder has 288 items in it, of which 23 are groups.
Clearly, we're storing ByObject prefs we just flat out don't need.
So what I'd like to do is figure out what the ByObject prefs are  
storing for each contact, and attempt to find ways to store the  
important data in something that's not ByObject so we could make  
ByObject files be deleted if they're no longer needed.
What I've figured is in there now is:
1) Preferred account
2) Spelling Language
3) Events
4) Local alias (?)
5) Old message history

5 can just be forgotten about with XML logging. I think we already  
don't use 4, but I want to be sure. 2 is definitely something we  
should save, as are preferred account and events.
That said, I think it might make more sense to store one large file  
rather than lots of little files, since we're looking at about 2k  
files with an average size of .5 kb, that's about 6 wasted megs of  
disk space for a bunch of files that themselves shouldn't take more  
than 1 meg.

Events I think it might make sense to store in a dedicated events  
preference location - and then include a more complete events editor  
that lets you see all of the configured events (sound notifs,  
everything) so that events for no-longer-listed buddies can be  
deleted (for example, custom sounds for a particular buddy) - or at  
least more easily purged.

I don't really see a need to store special events for unbuddied  
people anyway, so maybe it'd make more sense to just nuke events  
associated with a particular ListObject when that ListObject is  
deleted? Maybe we could do that with writing direction and last used  
spelling language too? Preferred account?

Any thoughts?

Augie