I'm not sure to understand. Are you talking about the dialog to set your user avatar or the avatar in contacts list?

Well I'm talking about the generic avatar that comes up when u add your irc contact. Its the same as all the others (msn, icq, jabber, etc) where adding an avatar works, and shows up when u send a message to another user, but for IRC, since its not understood by it, it ignores the avatar. I guess its not a massive deal, but at the time, I spent the time to upload an image for my irc avatar, when clicking on the blank avatar image (the general avatar for contacts), which then did nothing. I guess since IRC in general doesn't have the option for avatars, perhaps it should be taken out, though it would be nicer for users of empathy who use irc to see the other user's contact avatar.

Hope that makes more sense

kind regards,
David Van Assche

Created attachment 217363 [details]
Accounts dialog for an IRC account, showing useless avatar button

So I think the reporter was referring to the Personal Information dialog, now merged with the accounts dialog. The attached screenshot shows the accounts dialog for one of my IRC accounts, with the avatar selector circled in red. It's misleading to have that there, because setting an avatar for IRC has no effect whatsoever.

Personally, I'm more irritated by the big column of default avatars which shows up in IRC channels. Patches to fix the chat themes to only show avatars if the connection supports avatars to follow!

Created attachment 217370 [details] [review]
EmpathyChatView: add vfunc for showing/hiding avatars

Created attachment 217371 [details] [review]
EmpathyChat: tell view to show/hide avatars based on connection interfaces

I believe that by the time we get here the EmpathyTpChat's TpConnection
should be prepared enough to know its interfaces? It seems to be in my
brief testing.

Created attachment 217372 [details] [review]
Adium themes: implement set_show_avatars()

Created attachment 217373 [details] [review]
Boxes theme: implement set_show_avatars

These patches are against the gnome-3-4 branch, and I have tested them briefly. In my testing, avatars show up in freshly-launched XMPP chats and MUCs, and not in IRC privmsgs and channels, with both the “clean” theme and with the “minimal_mod” Adium theme.

Guillaume, I imagine you'll want to see how this interacts with your work to show cat pictures in preferences? I made both ThemeBoxes and ThemeAdium default to showing avatars just like they do now, so it should be fine.

I don't deal with the case where, after reconnecting, a connection miraculously starts/stops supporting avatars. And I'm not 100% sure that the connection is guaranteed to know its interfaces at the moment I check. Maybe Xavier knows?

Review of attachment 217370 [details] [review]:

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Review of attachment 217371 [details] [review]:

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Review of attachment 217372 [details] [review]:

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Attachment 217370 [details] pushed as 36dc063 - EmpathyChatView: add vfunc for showing/hiding avatars
Attachment 217371 [details] pushed as 13a16f0 - EmpathyChat: tell view to show/hide avatars based on connection interfaces
Attachment 217372 [details] pushed as db4d160 - Adium themes: implement set_show_avatars()
Attachment 217373 [details] pushed as 847a2ea - Boxes theme: implement set_show_avatars

Thanks for the patches; they applied nicely on top of master.

While we're on it, let's remove the avatar widget from the accounts dialog.

Created attachment 217486 [details] [review]
accounts-dialog: don't show the avatar button if avatars are not supported

Attachment 217486 [details] pushed as a711c1e - accounts-dialog: don't show the avatar button if avatars are not supported