GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 727388
Find a way to disable auto/implicit link
Last modified: 2018-09-21 16:09:03 UTC
Today we have a way to disable the auto link adding anti-link rules, but this cause a problem because this change the contact data. I am trying to find a way to disable the auto link in a general way that does not affect the contact data and I can easily link the contact manually if the user wants. My current implementation add a global anti link for every new contact. And this cause some problems: 1 - Working with contact sync, will cause the contact data change after add the global anti link flag, and this will cause the contact to be synced again. (this is not good in a account with more than 1000 contacts this can be very expensive). 2 - To manually link a contact you need to remove the global anti link. Removing the global anti-link will allow the contact to get auto linked again.
Created attachment 273336 [details] [review] Add a new property in individual aggregator to enable or disable the auto link.
As I said on IRC, I don’t like the idea of crippling the core feature of folks. Fixing your problems that way seems like a gross hack which would be subject to further problems in the future. I believe you said before that you wanted to disable implicit linking on all personas because there were some unwanted implicit links between, e.g., two persons who share an e-mail address but who aren’t actually the same person? For example, someone and their spouse who share an e-mail address. I suggest that instead of making huge changes to how implicit linking works, or disabling linking altogether, we work through these unwanted implicit links and come up with heuristics for fixing them? That was the original proviso of how folks was implemented: write a naïve but reasonable implementation to start with, then fix its heuristics as real-world feedback comes in. So for the problem of unwanted implicit linking by e-mail address, how does the following sound? We change folks to no longer aggregate two personas by linkable propertiees *if they come from the same PersonaStore*. I think that should fix it, though it would need some experimentation.
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