[Adium-devl] MSNP15 in Libpurple

[Felipe Contreras]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 4:49 PM, Peter Hosey <prh at boredzo.org> wrote:
> On Jul 14, 2008, at 06:43:55, Devid Antonio Filoni wrote:
>> Dimmuxx builds only enable personal messages as msn-pecan do but one
>> of the most feature requested by MSN user is the support for offline
>> messages, feature that will be enabled soon in msn-pecan …
>
> And Libpurple's MSNP15 doesn't do this?

Indeed, msn-pecan is just about to have basic support for offline
messages (read only). MSNP15 should have full support.

>> Another point to msn-pecan is that its code is better than libpurple
>> MSN protocol code.
>
> By what metric?

I think this is subjective right now. While indeed msn-pecan code has
some interesting core features it's still not evidently better.

Some of the things I think might not work correctly in msnp15:

 * http method
 * contact list handling, specially with the "Individuals" group
 * slow connection handling

A nice feature of msn-pecan is that it reports errors more properly
"Unknown error: 606" (command errors). "Parse error" (http parsing
errors) vs "Uknown Error". I've implemented this only on the
notification server, but I plan to do the same in the switchboard
server too. This would make it easier to track down errors.

Moreover, msn-pecan implements the most wanted features: #1 personal
messages, #2 oim read support, #3 fast file transfers. While trying to
fix long-standing issues, emulating slow connections, and injecting
fake random errors. Seriously, there's people that plainly can't even
connect.

It's tempting to fall back to the default belief that msnp15 is better
than msnp12, and that an official protocol plugin is better than an
"alternative" one, but IMO the only things that should be considered
is:

 * Is it stable?
 * Does it provides the features users want?

Best regards.

-- 
Felipe Contreras