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Having to add GTalk IM contacts manually

I recently started seriously started using Coccinella and noticed that that when adding GTalk IM contacts to my already jabber-server-connected functioning profile, my contact roster does not get added automatically. In other words, I have to add GTalk contacts one by one.

They do, on the other hand, get added automatically when I create a profile for GTalk contacts, but that defeats the purpose of operating Coccinella as an universal IM app.

There should be some utility to enable a seamless addition of GTalk contacts without having to run as a GTalk exclusive app. If this creeps into the multiserver no-go issue, why not employ a GTalk roster import feature. This roster list could be exported from a GTalk configured profile. Any duplicates could be pre-emptively eliminated during the import process.

Chascon

Forum: 

There was the Jabber Roster Utility for doing this in the past. Unfortunately, that project is unmaintained and not fully XMPP compatible so that it does not work with Google Talk.

Another, probably better solution would be to have support for Roster Item Exchange in both Coccinella and Google Talk. In that way it would be possible to send your contacts from Google Talk to Coccinella on the other server. Also unfortunately, both Coccinella and Google Talk do not support this.

For Coccinella this feature wish is tracked here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/coccinella/+bug/144876
For Google Talk you can ping them for this feature here: https://services.google.com/inquiry/talk_suggest (use the "I have a better idea:" field and add a link to this forum thread)

But why can't Coccinella be scriptable or available via apple scripts to automate the adding of multiple GTalk contacts?

It could simply repeat the simple and manual task of adding on GTalk contact at a time until there are none left to add. A list of contacts would be made available with semi-colens separating one from the other so that the script could be run for every and each one of those contacts between the semi-colons.

Chascon

Tcl is a scripting language. So, it's probably already possible. I just don't know how.

Still better is to add an entry File/Import/Contacts...
that reads and xml file. I have the Export entry so it shouldn't be hard to do.
Sander: an entry to our tracker if it's not there already. I can't keep track of our tracker ;-)

"Still better is to add an entry File/Import/Contacts...
that reads and xml file. I have the Export entry so it shouldn't be hard to do.
Sander: an entry to our tracker if it's not there already. I can't keep track of our tracker ;-"

I agree. You can take this one step further and --in the case of GTalk contacts-- allow this to occur on the fly. Meaning, rather than export your GTalk roster and then import it, you could do this in one step (as far as stupid users are concerned) and export and then import into your regular roster.

Of course, because Coccinella is not multi-server enabled, automation would require it to first log in to GTalk, log-off, and then log-in to one's selected default regular server while importation occurs seamlessly.

To pull it off automagically, pre-configured GTalk and default server settings must be detailed beforehand.

Chascon

Not sure if we need to automate all this. A well written document on the website (or even video tutorial) is IMO preferable for this uncommon task instead of making Coccinella bloaty. Or do you have an idea for integrating this by not making Coccinella more bloat?

How about just enabling a direct connect to GTalk while maintaining a running connection to whatever jabber server one runs? Since Coccinella connects directly to GTalk anyway, it can't be as much work as maintianing code for a multi-server app, or is it?

i assume there are no GTalk transports to deal with but I don't know if this makes maintenance of proposed code any easier.
Chascon

There exist XMPP transports with which you can connect to your Google Talk account from another account (or vice versa). btw, adding support for multiple accounts would be hard and would for sure introduce usability issues.