[Adium-devl] Contact list importing/exporting

[John Bailey]

Hi all,

Earlier this evening in #adium, a user was looking for a way to, for
lack of a better term, "transplant" his buddies ("contacts") from one
AIM account to another.  It was suggested to him that he try the
official AIM client to effect the move via an export from the old
account and an import to the new account.

When I saw this suggestion, I was somewhat surprised, as code to handle
such a task has existed for libpurple for two years now.  I wrote a
plugin called List Handler that provides both import and export
functionality, as well as directly copying from one account to another
without export and import steps.  I assumed that if I had bothered to
write such support for libpurple, surely someone had written it for
other applications.  Seems like that's not the case though.

Included in the plugin I wrote is code that directly handles Windows
AIM's .blt file format.  I would have included other formats, but I'm
not aware of any other official clients which have an export feature.
Because of the .blt handling, Catfish_Man suggested I mention it here.

I imagine it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to shoehorn the plugin
into an Adium plugin wrapper, assuming Adium implements the libpurple
request API.  It might, however, be more useful to just lift the parsing
code for the blt files from my plugin (it's C, of course) and find a
good place to drop it in Adium.

Does any of this sound useful?  I'd be happy to make myself available on
IRC, AIM, or XMPP for discussion if someone thinks it would be useful.
E-mail works, too, of course.

John
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