Re: [Gaim-devel] Automatic friendly name update

[Robert M. <rob...@de...>]

On Fri, Nov 08, 2002 at 11:02:00AM -0600, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> That has to be changed, the friendly name should go on another field, let's
> say 'remote_alias', the 'alias' is never auto-updated, you specify it or
> not.
> 
> -- 
> Felipe Contreras

Now I understand what you want - I agree. This is ideal. We need to add
a field to the buddy struct to hold the remote name if we want to put it
into the tooltip anyway. Then we need the same kind of logic we have for
aliases to consider the fields.

Could I suggest adding a function such as display_name that takes a
*buddy and returns a pointer to the correct one, then we won't ever have
to do this big run of replacing lots of references to screennames with
alias|screen-name, and now alias|remote-name|screen-name. This
centralised function should be easy to modify in the advent of
persistent/XML/etc buddy lists and will make it easy to get the right
name out of a buddy pointer, without repeating identical logic all over
the place like we do now.

Regards,
Rob

p.s. Note the implicit change of paradigm from buddies-as-names to
buddies-as-entities which we need in the long run to do things like
person support properly. It's necessary. Nobody said it would be easy.
:P