GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 633652
Removing a Contact in Empathy Deletes It from the Gmail Contact Manager
Last modified: 2010-11-02 13:30:10 UTC
The Gmail Contact Manager is my central repository for organizing my contacts 1) Lovingly fill in a contact's information: their Gmail address, mobile number, snail mail address, birthday, etc. The more you fill in the more this bug hurts. 2) Add your own Google Talk account, with the username you use to sign into Gmail, containing the contact from 1), to Empathy 3) Remove the contact from the list (right click, remove) 4) Empathy removes the whole contact from the manager. You're going to have to ask your friend for all that information again. I think that's a bug. I'm sure there's a way to mark the contact as "don't show up in chat contact lists" independent of deleting the whole thing. I'm pretty sure Pidgin doesn't do this. As such, it's back to Pidgin for me. Thanks.
Google's roster extensions do have an attribute for “don't show this contact”, but we don't use it. (Nor does Pidgin.) We don't show Google Talk contacts which have subscription='none', so Gabble could change its behaviour to make removing from the contact list on Google Talk actually just remove all subscriptions, not actually delete the contact. This would be consistent with our existing GTalk special cases, which match those in Pidgin (which were added by a Google Talk server developer).
Cool, I opened https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31319 as that's a gabble bug.