msn-pecan 0.1 good enough?

[Chris Forsythe]

If you think it's good enough, why is it not numbered 1.0? It's a bit  
odd that it's such a low version number, that doesn't instill  
confidence to me. (yes, I know, it's "just a version number". But not  
really.)

Chris

On Mar 12, 2010, at 4:37 AM, Felipe Contreras wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Back in 2008 there was a proposal to use msn-pecan, and even though I
> wasn't sure about msn-pecan's stability, I promised to do my best to
> fix as many bugs as possible:
> http://adium.im/pipermail/devel_adium.im/2008-June/005183.html
>
> However, Pidgin's MSNP15 came into play and the decision was to switch
> to it, leaving open the possibility to switch back to msn-pecan once
> the features were outgrown:
> http://adium.im/pipermail/devel_adium.im/2008-September/005765.html
>
> I believe this moment has come with the 0.1 release which I consider
> to be rock-solid, and has the most requested features: direct file
> transfers, and offline messages (sending and receiving). Pidgin
> doesn't support direct file transfers, and probably won't any time
> soon.
>
> I hope at this point in time it's clear which protocol plug-in is
> better. However, there are more important reasons why I think
> msn-pecan should be used, and my argument resides in three premises:
>
> 1) I am the one that has better knowledge of *both* code-bases;
> msn-pecan, and stock libpurple
>
> As you can see this an old blog post [1]; 42% of my code from 2004
> hasn't been changed. The second biggest contributor is QuLogic with
> only 18% (way behind). If you use stock libpurple you'll be trusting
> two guys that wrote only 25% of the code.
>
> 2) Pidgin guys have admitted the MSN protocol is *under-maintained*
>
> John Bailey explained in his blog[2] the reason of their negligence
> regarding the MSN protocol; most of the developers don't care. He also
> explained that they need help which is no surprise due to their lack
> of expertise on their own code.
>
> 3) The plug-in is not only under-maintained, but also badly maintained
>
> I plotted some bug statistics[3] and the results are crystal clear:
> msn-pecan has fixed 78% of the valid bugs reported, while Pidgin only
> 37%. Even if we concentrate only on the bugs that are open at the
> moment (which are in the 2 week window before they are automatically
> closed), those are not properly prioritized, nor categorized like in
> msn-pecan. So in essence, bugs reported to msn-pecan have much higher
> chances of actually be fixed.
>
>
> All in all, I don't see any future in libpurple's stock MSN plugin,
> and I don't think Adium should stick with it, specially since it's the
> most popular service[4]. Besides, msn-pecan does have a plan forward
> [5], while Pidgin doesn't. And finally, if you find any problems with
> msn-pecan, they will be tackled eventually for sure.
>
> Cheers.
>
> [1] http://felipec.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/who-wrote-pidgins-msn-not-who-you-think/
> [2] http://theflamingbanker.blogspot.com/2010/01/on-subject-of-bugs-or-help-wanted-and.html
> [3] http://felipec.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/pidgin-vs-msn-pecan-bug-numbers-dont-lie/
> [4] http://adium.im/sparkle/#IMServicesWeighted
> [5] http://code.google.com/p/msn-pecan/wiki/ToDo
>
> -- 
> Felipe Contreras
>