First of all, I think I hadn't understood the concept of a roster contact. So, just to make things clear: a roster contact does exist locally, only it isn't stored by the Evolution Data Center, correct? And Hermes won't see it because it only uses contacts stored in the EDS.

If that's the case, why did you choose to use the libebook library instead of libosso-abook? No Python bindings? As stated here:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...k_API#libebook

"N.B. Developers are discouraged from using the EBook and EBookView classes of libebook because they do not provide libosso-abook's features of contact aggregation, presence abstraction, and so on."

There is no warning message in Hermes saying that some of the contacts won't be updated because they are roster contacts and for a simple user it wouldn't make sense anyway. After all, if it is listed in the Contacts application, it is a user, don't you agree?

If I'm missing something, please forgive my ignorance.