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
