Support username-only contacts

[benjaminbhollon]

None of my contacts I know the username of but not the phone number show up in scli. I can receive messages from them but they show up as UNKNOWN CONTACT and I can't send messages.

signal-cli itself supports those contacts, so my guess is that scli identifies contacts by phone number instead of the ACI signal-cli lists?

[exquo]

This is a real problem! It is caused by signal-cli's DBus methods not listing the "UUID-only" contacts (upstream issue). To resolve this, either signal-cli would have to make the necessary modifications to its DBus interface, or scli will need to switch to using another interface, e.g. signal-cli's JSON-RPC (a feature request already exists). The fixes to signal-cli's DBus issues have not been forthcoming for a while now. So scli will likely need to transition to using JSON-RPC instead. I can't put an ETA on it yet, as it'll entail replacing large chunks of existing code; but the current issue, along with the other dbus-caused blockers for scli, will put it high on the list of priorities. In the short term I'll try to make workarounds, at least for sending messages to UNKNOWN CONTACTs.

[benjaminbhollon]

Ah, I wasn't aware there was an upstream component to this. That makes sense.