[Adium-devl] Solving, once and for all, problems with contact list ordering and grouping and aliases

[disposable at infinitenexus.com]

On Mar 10, 2007, at 12:12 PM, Peter Hosey wrote:

> On Mar 10, 2007, at 04:49:04, Colin Barrett wrote:
>> Sync all of this to a server on adiumx.com or adium.org or what not.

Absolutely a horrid idea, I'm sorry. We are not in the business of  
becoming a protocol service intermediary. We produce a _client_, a  
_consumer_ of services. Also, most of the protocols have provided  
their own storage, allowing logins on alternate machines without  
worrying about syncing and you're proposing we go contra to this and  
force our users into our platform, our servers, and our way of  
thinking just like the companies that we harp about. We have  
witnessed the effect of this when 1.0 logs were no longer externally  
accessible, and now you want to take down contact lists...

To justify it you'd certainly need more than 1 out of 12+ protocols  
to exhibit significant enough issues to warrant all of what propose.

I'd also wonder about the legal ramifications of us intercepting  
third-party data and storing it on our own, at this point without the  
user actually knowing they've made such an exposure. I'm a developer  
and I'm certainly not comfortable with the idea at all.

>
> Let's allow the user to override the server name, so that an  
> organization could have a custom Adium-contact-list server.

And when we receive continued requests to expand our custom server  
support, where will the line draw?

>
> Perhaps we could even allow syncing it to .Mac.

Also not really the best, it'd end up like the old on-disk storage -  
hosed. Syncing is a trickle tech - sync the full thing once,  
incrementally afterwards. Saving server lists is essentially blasting  
whatever is there out to ensure correctness, defeating the purpose of  
conflict resolution and all the other machinery therein. In addition,  
a monolithic schema encompassing all the protocol knobs and sliders   
being saved per contact into the list.


- brian 'bgannin' ganninger