libravatar-fans team mailing list archive

[Sheogorath <ubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello fellow fans,

Last Friday I was looking at the progress we made with on evolution,
the mail client.[1] And of course now other Gnome applications look at
these changes and we will most likely end up with a bunch of libravatar
implementations all over the place in Gnome and most of them will
probably be incomplete.

Therefore I started a little Proof of Concept application that would
take care of the libravatar implementation and boil it down to a dbus
IPC call that would simply give you a local avatar file.[2]

For now you get the path to the file, due to NodeJS limitations that
doesn't allow you to pass file handles through dbus. But a proper
implementation could hand over file handles and this way even allow
sandboxed applications to access them.

Therefore I have 2 things I want to know from you:

1. What do you think about the general idea? Does it make sense to
proceed on this or is it a waste of time and applications should
implement it themselves using the existing libraries?
2. What would be the proper way to implement a dbus interface here?
It's my first project that uses dbus and I'm not really used to all
concepts etc.

For your information: Of course the NodeJS implementation is not great
and brings a bunch of problems with it. Therefore for a future
implementation I would like to go for rust instead. All guidance and
help is very welcome as I'm not a rust developer yet.

Alternatively I could also imagine getting this implementation
integrated in some other service, but I'm not sure which one would be a
good candicate. Gnome contacts maybe?

[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/issues/793
[2]: https://git.shivering-isles.com/shivering-isles/libravatar-dbus
-- 
Signed
Sheogorath

OpenPGP: https://shivering-isles.com/openpgp/0xFCB98C2A3EC6F601.txt