> For more than 5 years now, this is being used in production at SAPO. If > several contacts have the same hash (based on the algorithm above) then the > client displays them in the same meta-contact.
This poor man's metacontacts approach could be enough, indeed. I don't really understand yet why you would do the complex hashing thing, I would just (optionally) group all contacts with the same name within the same group into one metacontact. This would mean that, if one of the sub-contacts is in two groups, it would be in a meta-contact in one group, and be separated in the other. As far as I understand, with your approach, it wouldn't be in any metacontact at all? Things become more complex when you stop displaying the roster name to the user, and only display the names that the user assigned to himself (nickname xep). Maybe in that case, you would have to make sure that the roster name is something sensible initially, and you create metacontacts by dragging & dropping contacts on each other, which as a result would rename the contact to the item you dragged onto it. The user would never see the actual assigned 'names' in his client, but they should be sensible because other clients might show it. cheers, Remko
