msn-pecan 0.1 good enough?

[Stephen Holt]

I'm not a heavy MSN user at all, but it's my understanding that there
are feature regressions in MSN-Pecan.  What are they, and can they be
fixed?

I would not be in favor of protocol code that means feature regressions for us.

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 7:52 AM, Chris Forsythe <chris at growl.info> wrote:
> 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
>>
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