KPeople Logs integration. Was: How to migrate to KAccounts

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 13.11.2014 12:04, Daniel Vrátil wrote:
> Getting list of log events (messages) from all contacts for a given person is
> a peace of cake. Each log event has a timestamp, so merging the lists together
> is pretty easy too , we just need to make sure that the we preserve
> information about the original account. Well, that's the theoretical case,
> anyway. Now back to reality, where the situation is much more complicated:
>
> I will chat with Dave about KTp via Jabber in the morning. During lunch he
> messages me via Facebook about some completely other problem, because I'm
> offline on Jabber. When I get back on Jabber later that day, we finish our
> conversation about KTp on Jabber. Now if you would merge these two
> conversations into one, it won't make any sense, as they are basically two
> different conversations.
> On the other hand, we could be chatting via Facebook, because I'm on my way
> home. Once I arrive home, I start my computer, open KTp and continue chatting,
> but KTp would choose Jabber instead of Facebook. In this case, merging the
> logs is desirable.

Of course not all logs with the same person are always on the same 
topic, but I don't see why logs from chats with the same person over 
different protocols would be more likely to be about different topics 
than those over the same protocol, unless some cases like seeing a post 
from someone on Facebook and then talking to that person via FB chat 
about that post.

 From my experience I can say that I usually only realize that a 
conversation started over a different protocol when I cannot find it in 
the history, which I find annoying.

In my personal double-rainbow world, we'd have a system that would 
detect conversations from the content and merge the logs 
"intelligently". I of course realize that this is far far from reality 
for the time being, though.

> (That is merging on Dave's computer. In my case the logs are scattered on
> multiple physical devices, which is a completely different can of worms).
>
> Basically, the solution I came up with (but never got to implement it in
> LogViewer) is, that when you select a person and a date, the log view would
> simply show several tabs: one "All Conversations" tab, and then a one tab for
> each account. The "All Conversations" showing the merged logs, while the
> account tabs allowing you to read the conversations separately by accounts.
> This solves both the problems outlined above. I think it's worth asking the
> VDG/UX guys, they might come up with some better ideas how to solve this.

I like that! Of course we can still brainstorm it a bit in the forums.
Actually, in a thread about design for NextMail [1], the idea of a 
general "unified communication manager" came up again.
And I've already talked about merging conversations in a blog post [2] 
last year which got mostly positive reactions.

Even before having such a "unified communication manager", I'd like to 
see the KPeople-powered address book as the main point of entrance for 
all conversations with that person (including emails, IRC query logs and 
whatnot) instead of an application dedicated only to IM log viewing.

> Other idea I had, but couldn't implement because of Adium-based Text-ui was
> showing the per-account logs side-by-side as a time line:
>
> Time	|	 Jabber	|	Facebook	|
> 10:00	| blabla		|				|
> 10:01	| 	  blabla!	|				|
>
> 12:30	|			| 		blabla? |
> 12:31	|			| bla.			|
>
> .... but that is a slight overkill :-)

This may indeed be overkill. I think a tabbed view with an "All 
Conversations" tab as the first one should do fine for most (all?) cases.

> Obviously these solutions do not work for the scrollback shown in text-ui, but
> unconditional merging is probably desirable there.

Yes, unconditional merging should do fine for scrollback, maybe with a 
hint that these messages were sent/received via this account.

Thank you for your insights, I think we can make conversation history 
viewing really great with the technology we have.
Cheers,
Thomas

[1] https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=285&t=122889
[2] 
http://sessellift.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/unified-communication-what-kpeople-and-nepomuk-can-do-for-you-in-the-future/