Hello everybody, I'm sorry for jumping in here, but reading this thread about msn-pecan is bothering me.
I am not an Adium developer (yet), just an active user and avid fan of Adium; though I am working towards squashing some bugs when I have some free time. What drove me to comment on all of this is the way that Felipe is going about trying to have his 'fork' included in the next Adium release. Felipe, the primary Adium developers have already given you very valid reasons why they will not switch to msn-pecan for this release. 'No regressions' is not just a buzzword, it is policy. You need to accept that. I am one of those people that use MSN -> Yahoo contacts. Would direct file transfers be nice? Possibly for some people, but for myself, I use gmail to transfer files up to a certain size and FTP for files past that size. Would I appreciate that I could no longer use the MSN -> Yahoo bridge in exchange for direct file transfers? Not at all. If I wasn't following this listserv and didn't know about losing Yahoo contacts, I likely would have filed a bug report, which in turn would have taken precious time away from the developers. Furthermore, according to your blog, msn-pecan has been stable at 0.1 at less than a month. I don't know about everybody else, but switching from a proven, stable library to something that is essentially a hostile fork, which hasn't even been in use for more than a month, seems dangerous within a popular product like Adium. If direct file transfers is such a hot request, what is to stop you (or somebody else) from submitting it as a patch to libpurple? It almost seems like you are doing this to spite the maintainers of libpurple, which is not a vote of confidence for the ability to work with you. You might have the greatest product in the world, but what happens if you have a disagreement and decide to not support msn-pecan anymore? Well, this is exactly what you've done with libpurple - you say so yourself on your blog. This does not instil confidence. Felipe, the way you are going about this is very odd and you can come across as very abrasive. You have taken the time to reply to many of the developers' valid points with sarcastic and sometimes aggressive retorts. One example of this is "As I said in another reply; empty slogans such as "no regressions" mean nothing. It's just a way of making engineers (or managers) happy.". You're attacking common Adium policy here. Heck, it is the policy of any good shipping software. In my opinion, the only time a feature regression would be acceptable is if it fixes a severe, crippling bug. As far as I've seen from my own heavy use in Adium, Libpurple is stable and I've come across very few bugs. For reference, I downloaded and tried the msn-pecan / Adium test from Google Code when it was first announced. I didn't catch any noticeable benefits so I subsequently switched back to the stock Adium. I was initially impressed by the enthusiasm, but after researching the history of the fork and what it does exactly, I can say that I've lost that enthusiasm. You need to accept what the developers have said repeatedly. Things are already progressing very slowly getting the next release out the door. Even if msn-pecan did not introduce a somewhat major feature regression, it would likely not be included in 1.4. The most likely scenario is that when the developers focus on 1.5 they might be ready to consider msn-pecan, at which point somebody will likely let you know. But as it is, the time and resources to implement a change like this for the next release is not possible. Your regular bombardment of emails to the developers is not going to magically convince them otherwise. Please calm down, Felipe. -G
