Re: DnD of Contacts one on another to link it

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Sat, 2011-10-29 at 16:55 -0400, Erick Pérez Castellanos wrote:
> Hi:
> 
> Afte some talk with Allan, Alex and some others we got this idea, we can
> allow people to link contacts by dragging one contact over the other.
> the dragged will be linked into the other one, or that what I think.
> 
> Well, I got the patches working, there's two think still bothering me:
> 1. Which icon/image/cairo_surface will we use on the DnD to tell we are
> linking a contact ?

Do you mean the cursor when dragging, or the cursor used when hovering
over the drop target?

> 2. I have to be online to handle my contacts ? I tried create a new
> contact being offline at home and I got some error. Is this right, or is
> this a bug ? I think uses should be able to handle their contacts no
> matter their connection status. Anyway that can be a bug.

If you're using a google contacts addressbook then the non-online view
is purely a read-only cache of the data. You need to be online to modify
it. That is how the e-d-s google backend works.

The reason it works like this is that having a local readonly cache for
viewing and doing modifications only via the network is tractable. If we
were to locally cache modifications and then send them when we go online
you suddenly have to support a "merge" operation, where e.g. google
might reject your change (due to some API requirement, there are lots of
those) or it might overwrite a change from some other device. 

Basically, doing offline modification of contacts turns into a sync
problem, similar to SyncEvolution, with all the problems that have.