Felipe Contreras

Hello!

It has been a long time since the previous release, and there’s a reason for that, but first, on with the release.

This release would have pretty dull without Devid, since he pretty much did the two new features: custom emoticon sending support, and a new feature called for a lack of better name ‘independent personal status messages’.

I’ll try to explain ‘independent psm’. It’s related to issue 51 (Easier way to setup personal messages), now you set psm just like your ‘Friendly name’, since Pidgin lacks of a unified way to set nicknames, and psm, then both are now available as account operations.

This means the old way of setting psm would not work. Some people might not like this, so you can turn this feature off.

Ideally, something like Craig Harding’s personal bar should be implemented in Pidgin, but since they are stubborn as rocks you’ll better help Craig and use it as a plug-in.

Also, we have new translations: Danish, German, Hungarian, Norwegian Bokmal, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. If your favorite language is not translated you can help at Launchpad’s site, it’s pretty easy!

Here’s the diffstat:
Makefile | 191 +++++++++++++++++++-------------------
cvr/pecan_slp_object.c | 71 ++++++++++++++
cvr/pecan_slp_object.h | 15 +++
cvr/slp.c | 26 +++++-
io/pecan_http_server.c | 2 +-
msn.c | 238 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---
pecan_oim.c | 2 +-
pecan_status.c | 42 +++++---
switchboard.c | 67 +++++++++++++-
9 files changed, 518 insertions(+), 136 deletions(-)

Download from the usual place at googe code.

Status of pidgin’s official plug-in

Now, if you remember Adium decided to switch to the new official msn plugin, how is that going?

Well, if you go to Pidgin’s site, you’ll see a whole lot of bug reports. There’s a bunch of ‘account not connecting’, ‘crashing since 2.5′, just as I expected. If you go Adium’s tracker, you’ll see something similar.

Of course, msn-pecan also has some crash issues, but those have been identified as issues with buddy icons, if you disable them (which you can), then it works perfectly fine. On the other hand there are no connection issues.

So yeah, the official plug-in has MSNP15 support (which give it absolutely no extra features compared to msn-pecan btw) but some people aren’t being able to connect! Focus on the essential features, then think about the fancy ones, that’s what msn-pecan does.

Kopete’s libmsn and the future

So Tiago Salem Herrmann has managed to get his libmsn-2 into Kopete, congratulations!

I have been playing with a standalone libmsn-pecan, that other projects can use, not just Pidgin, so libmsn-2 seemed like a possible replacement, no need to re-invent the wheel, right? But unfortunately libmsn-2 is written in C++ and there are no C bindings.

So I thought on creating C bindings for libmsn-2, actually the same C API can be used for libmsn-pecan and libmsn-2.

So this is the plan:

msn-pecan plan

I already have been working on a separate libmsn-pecan, that can be used by Telepathy, and Pidgin. But now there will be the extra option of using libmsn-2’s code instead of libmsn-pecan, but the plugins wouldn’t notice any difference, hence, libmsn-2’s code can be shared among Kopete, Pidgin, and Empathy.

There’s plenty of work to do before this can be sueful, but I already started it:

• libmsn-pecan (libmsn branch)
• purple-msn-pecan
• telepathy-msn-pecan

Who wants to join?