Custom control channels (fill_by custom)

[antoine.levitt@…]

Hi,

I'd like to have custom channels, where I'd merge contacts from several accounts (one from jabber, one from facebook, and so on). I'd assume this would be a popular feature: for instance, I have tons of facebook contacts to whom I never speak, and I'd be happy to have a way to restrict bitlbee to only show the ones I actually speak to.

Right now, this only works for groups, which are limited to one account only. Ideally, there'd be something like a new "custom" fill_by option, with a way to specify a list of contacts that should go into that group (for instance by /invites)

[wilmer]

Right now, this only works for groups, which are limited to one account only.

Actually they're not, unless I'm missing your point. However, you mention Facebook here and I guess the problem is that Facebook XMPP doesn't do sensible roster management at all, so you can't use it to add people to groups.

[Antoine Levitt <antoine.levitt@…>]

Patch for channels with custom users

[Antoine Levitt <antoine.levitt@…>]

Ah, right, a channel in "group" mode will display any contacts in the specified group, regardless of protocol, sorry. It's unfortunate that facebook offers such a poor XMPP implementation. So such a feature would still make sense for protocols that don't support groups.

I ended up with a trivial and (extremely) dirty hack that reads contacts from a text file (I'm not comfortable with modifying the code to the extent needed to add a custom fill_by and managing a set of contacts for each channel). I'm sharing it in case someone is interested.

[wilmer]

YEah, I suppose keeping track of buddy groups locally for those protocols would be useful. Just a little bit against my wish to keep as little config/state info stored in BitlBee as possible.

At least you have your patch for now. :-)

[dx]

Removing patch tag because the patch is extremely specific (/home/antoine/.bitlbee_friends lol)