[Psi-Devel] Importing aliases and groups

[textshell-I1QKlO at neutronstar.dyndns.org]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 01:55:12PM -0500, Cliff Dugal wrote:
> On Sunday, December 23, 2007, wwp wrote:
> > Since editing the config.xml file while offline doesn't work (edits
> > will get lost when going online), is there another way to "import"
> > aliases and groups from an old account to a new one?

yes, that data is just a cache so the roster looks nicer before login.

> 
> You could try the Jabber roster utility at http://jru.jabberstudio.org/ , 
> though you'll still need to do a lot of things manually.
> 
> > If a "reference account" property is set to a new account, could it
> > be possible (programmatically or using a plugin called upon specific
> > events) to make sure that every contact that gets added to the new
> > account list will have its alias and group imported from the reference
> > old account?
> 

No, i don' think that's code i would want to have in the mainline version.

> I suppose it could be possible to set up rules such that any contact added on 
> an account will have its JID checked against a "reference account", and if 
> the JID matches, then your choice of contact properties would be set. There 
> would have to be a place to specify server aliases so that MSN et. al. 
> contacts will work too.
> 
> In my mind, this would not be a core client functionality, so I would say that 
> this is a better candidate for a plugin.

Yes, this kind of thing is definitivly something more suited for plugins
and/or remote controling psi via dbus. 
If we had plugin support it would for example be possible to write a plugin
that would offer contact renaming via dbus or with some template for
mass renaming.
But it doesn't really belong into the core and plugins will still take some
time to be something that's really shippable.

So sadly at the moment there's not much to help.

 - Martin H.