Re: [Gmailagent-devel] About a contacts frontend + RFC

[Waseem S. D. <wd...@MI...>]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005, Stas Z wrote:
> After about 16 hours of hacking I came to the conclusion that my approach of
> a local contacts file in conjunction with the online contacts is
> terrible to maintain :-(

I definitely don't disagree here. Maintaining some sort of coherency
between two copies of data is always icky.

> RFC:
> My idea is to create a separate GUI as a local frontend to the whole
> Gmail contacts
> framework, including editing, adding and removal. When there's support
> for the export
> of the contacts into other formats, like discussed in a prior post, I
> will include that also.
> This frontend will import the contacts, the user can do his thing and
> saves the contacts
> to disk. (That should perhaps also be the default action when the user
> closes the app)

Maybe this is the part I don't understand. Would this frontend run only
once, on initial GmailAgent start? Or would it start at the beginning of
each session, constantly getting the revised contacts list?

I guess the only reason I don't like the idea is that you won't always
have the most up-to-date Gmail contacts. But I guess it's hard to design
an elegant solution to do that ... so I suppose this is a reasonable
second best. Though there should be an option to invoke the updater
yourself.

What about not maintaining your own list at all, though, and just reading
from Gmail every time you want to do a contacts transaction? The downside
there is you have to be online and it might consume a bit of bandwidth.

In short: I think it is certainly a reasonable approach.
I intend to do the vCard export at some point in the near future (perhaps
this weekend).

- W