[Adium-devl] Contact list importing/exporting

[Eric Richie]

On Jul 19, 2008, at 4:03 AM, John Bailey wrote:

> 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.

Yes, I do think this would be a welcomed addition.  We already support  
allowing users to import various things from iChat and Fire and we've  
had quite a few requests over the years from people who wanted a way  
to import AIM buddies from another account. (Not to mention scores of  
requests to export as a means of backing up thier contacts.)  I  
definitely think this would be worthwhile.

-Eric