Pidgin plugin only searches available buddies

[Jan]

Comment by bhm from http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/cardapio-adds-usb-ipod-mountpoints-in-places/
»Pidgin plugin allows to search only for available people. Most of people I have on my list uses Invisible status. So do I.«

Is searching through not-available buddies possible?

[Paweł Bara (keirangtp)]

I've checked the Pidgin's API again and it seems that I can determine the exact status of buddy meaning I can add contacts with "invisible" status to the search results too. But... The invisible status behaves in various ways. I'm pretty sure that it's proper recognition depends on the protocol you're using. For example, to Pidgin Gadu-Gadu's (most popular protocol in Poland) invisible status equals offline status.

Does Pidgin list your buddies as "invisible"? If it does, could you tell me what protocol are you using?

[Jan (jancborchardt-deactivatedaccount)]

I can't help there because I am not using Pidgin – I just forwarded the comment from the blog post. I replied to him with a link to this bug though.

But generally: Is it possible to list offline contacts as well – and with offline messaging possible, wouldn‘t it be intelligent to search through all contacts? (I don‘t know how you currently do this but then the status could be used as the icon next to the name in the results.)

[Paweł Bara (keirangtp)]

I was a bit reluctant to show offline buddies but your idea with status icons sounds very good. :) Will try to do it this way.

[Paweł Bara (keirangtp)]

We're on our way.

First I'm gathering all of the buddies, then sorting them by status, then cropping the list according to the search results limit. This favors "available" buddies whenever there are too many results.

The only thing that's left to do are the icons. I'll have to wait for Thiago with this one.

[Thiago Teixeira (tvst)]

Oh, strange, I had sent a reply to your email about the icons last week but aparently it was still sitting on my outbox. It's been sent now. FWIW, this is the meat of it:

Just use the themeable status icons given in http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-naming-spec/icon-naming-spec-latest.html , which are

user-available, user-idle, user-offline, user-away

Also, there are some non-standard (yet widely-used) icons too:

user-busy, user-extended-away, user-invisible, user-online

You can see examples at http://code.google.com/p/gnome-colors/source/browse/#svn/trunk/gnome-colors/gnome-colors-common/22x22/status in the folder trunk/gnome-colors/gnome-colors-common/22x22/status

[Paweł Bara (keirangtp)]

I'm translating Pidgin's statuses to standard icons.

The complete fix is now waiting for merge approval.