[Adium-devl] MSNp15 (libpurple im.pidgin.pidgin) in Adium 1.3.x

[Felipe Contreras]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Robert Vehse <robert.vehse at gmx.de> wrote:
>
> Am 10.09.2008 um 18:26 schrieb Felipe Contreras:
>
> On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 6:43 PM, Robert Vehse <robert.vehse at gmx.de> wrote:
>
> I'm happy to have merely one MSN-only contact in my list, not having
> to rely on MSN.
> However, from the standpoint of someone working in Trac and in the
> forums MSN-Pecan looks like a regression to me. With MSNp9 we knew
> there were certain features missing and most users had arranged
> themselves with that and I cannot remember any MSN-related crashes.
>
> Fine, focus only on the drawbacks.
>
> Now I'm seeing a great influx of reports –  a multitude of crashes
> (at least nine of them right now!), connection problems, pictures and
> aliases not showing and more.
> For reference, here you can see all tickets with the "msn-pecan"
> component: http://trac.adiumx.com/query?
> status=new&status=assigned&status=reopened&component=msn-
> pecan&order=type.
>
> Have you read them?
> Crashes:
> 10995: probably in adium
> 10705: rare
> 10704: rare
> 10971: no idea
>
> 10228 (not rare), 10278 (not rare), 10646 (not rare), 10865 (might be
> duplicate, hasn't been looked at, yet), 10958 (HTTP only). It adds up.

Yes, it adds up, but I honestly think most of the crashes can be
grouped in two. It could happen that with a few fixes groups of
crashes would disappear.

> Connection problems:
> 10146: was happening on msnp9, I took over
> 10974: not common, and probably happens on msnp*
> 10935: happens on msnp*, fix is already implemented in msn-pecan
>
> Perhaps those tickets don't count much but I'm seeing complaints over
> connections problems with MSN in many places (different forums, IRC).

Well, I've been even asking how well is msn-pecan doing and I've only
heard positive feedback. Do you have pointers to those forums?

> Aliases not showing:
> Where?
>
> http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/10758

Ah, I forgot about that one, but actually the log says:
19:22:31: -[AIListContact setServersideAlias:silently:]:
<AIListContact:18971b00 MSN.foo at hotmail.com> received alias Foo

Are you sure it's an msn-pecan issue?

> Pictures:
> Yeah, I'm working on that.
>
> I know that. :)
>
> I can't say much about libpurple MSNp15 but MSN-Pecan seems almost as
> bad what we had before and I never thought I would say that.
>
> Most of the crashes are related to bad usage of switchboards and
> cvr(p2p) code. That means that a couple of key fixes might actually
> fix most of the issues.
> But I guess the code is not important.
> --
> Felipe Contreras
>
> Important is (quoting Stephen Holt): "Whatever gives the users the features
> they'd use with the least amount of complexity for us ".
> I really appreciate that you're trying to clean up the code but the problem
> I see is that we've been flooded with complaints over MSN since 1.3

Well, are you sure you will get fewer complaints with msnp15?

To me blind hope is not the right thing to do, neither is to avoid
your responsibility on providing a good user experience. A good
practice of open source communities is to bring together users and
developers; if you rely completely on whatever Pidgin team throws up
you are just being lazy to the detriment of your users.

If the situation is so bad in msn-pecan (which I haven't been told
until now), there are strategies to track down the issues. For example
a new checkbox to disable user displays altogether, if the crashes
disappear we know where the issue is, if they don't then we know where
it's not. From what I can see the issues are probably in two places,
and with this measure I can concentrate my efforts. Suck checkboxes
can be enabled in beta builds for example, and it's a way to involve
users so the have more control over what's happening with the project,
as opposed to just wait.

> Am 10.09.2008 um 18:28 schrieb Peter Hosey:
>
> On Sep 10, 2008, at 08:43:26, Robert Vehse wrote:
>
> a multitude of crashes (at least nine of them right now!)
>
> Have we reported all of these in the MSN-pecan bug-tracker?
>
> Do you expect us to report them all upstream?

No, I that's not necessary.

-- 
Felipe Contreras