[GnomeMeeting-devel-list] [RFC] New addressbook, evolution-data-server and internal contacts

[PUYDT Julien <julien puydt laposte net>]

Hi,

I want to try to describe what's the current situation in gm, and
discuss things that could be done. Feel free to answer with corrections
and/or new ideas!

Contacts can be found in several places in gnomemeeting, and in
different forms:
* in the address bar, as a simple callto or h323 address;
* in the calls history, where there is more information;
* in the ils listing, with even more information;
* in the internal addressbook, with basic information;
* in the text-chat, as a simple h323 address.

Those contacts are stored in various formats: as data in a gtk widget or
as a simple string with fields separated by '|', for example. They can
generally be used with drag'n drop, which is nice.

The 1.00 code has several problems, that stem from this:
* all components need to know the existence of others;
* worse, they need to know the internals of the others, to be able to
get the data they want (see for example after line 284 of
src/ldap_window.cpp for an example).

The idea would be to unite things a little: if dragged contacts were of
a known type, the code to handle them could be mostly shared, and the
various parts of the code working with contacts wouldn't need to know
about each other.

So the question is: which type of contact to use? The answer is, in my
opinion, pretty clear: we would like to integrate with the rest of
gnome, and for the rest of gnome, evolution-data-server is gonna be the
standard.

I went to #evolution to discuss about it, and get some information; here
is what I gathered:
* the dragged contact will be of type "text/x-vcard", and contain the
raw vcard text;
* there are two types of contact that can be created from that
information: EVCard and EContact (they are quite comparable, see:
http://anoncvs.gnome.gr.jp/viewcvs.cgi/evolution-data-server/addressbook/libebook/e-vcard.h?view=markup and http://anoncvs.gnome.gr.jp/viewcvs.cgi/evolution-data-server/addressbook/libebook/e-contact.h?view=markup)
* both of them have a field that can get an h323/callto url (search for
"VIDEO" in the headers I linked to).

Here are the questions I still have:
* should gnomemeeting have no addressbook at all, and fully rely on
* how will speed-dial work?

Snark