Ubuntu-LB "State of the MSN Plugin Address"

[Wissam Youssef]

Finally!!!!

On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 1:08 PM, Dani Soufi <danisoufi at gmail.com> wrote:
> "State of the MSN Plugin Address"
>
> July 05, 2008 09:50 PM by John Bailey
>
> Yes, the title is intended to be half joking. Just a few days ago I made a
> comment to a fellow developer that "someone needs to make a 'state of the
> msn plugin' address," meaning that someone needs to let people know what's
> happening. Well, looks like that someone's going to be me. So here's the
> outsider's summary of what's happened.
>
> In current Pidgin releases, the default MSN plugin uses the old MSNP9
> protocol. This protocol doesn't support Personal Status Messages (PSM, also
> called "personal messages"), nor does it support offline IM, current media
> (a field that shows what music you're listening to or what video you're
> watching), or messaging while invisible.
>
> Two years ago, for the 2006 Summer of Code, we had a student whose project
> was to update our MSN code to MSNP13. MSNP13 supported the PSM and current
> media, although at the time libpurple didn't support the status attributes
> for "now playing" or "current media" or whatever you prefer to call it.
> MSNP13 may also have supported messaging while offline, but I can't recall
> for certain and I don't, at the moment, feel like looking it up in the
> documentation we have online. Later this was updated to MSNP14 for Yahoo!
> interoperability support. At the end of the summer, the code wasn't of a
> quality we were ready to release. The code sat.
>
> Last year, we had another student take on MSN protocol updating. This time
> the student updated the code to support MSNP14, starting from the previous
> work. This supported offline messaging for sure, and there were a lot of
> commits that dealt with the OIM features. Again, at the end of the summer,
> the code wasn't release-ready in our opinion, so again the code sat.
>
> Earlier this year, one of our developers started working on the MSNP14 code
> in a side branch, and eventually merged it to the im.pidgin.pidgin branch in
> our monotone repository. Because the code still wasn't release-ready, we
> disabled it and forced the MSNP9 plugin to build by default. The more clever
> users were still able to figure out how to get MSNP14 going, but there
> weren't too many until we introduced an argument to the configure script to
> enable the MSNP14 plugin.
>
> A new "crazy patch writer" appeared and started to work on MSNP15 support.
> We eventually gave him write access to the central monotone repository at
> pidgin.im. This has paid off for us very well. Elliott has done a LOT of
> work, including some necessary cleanup, stability improvements, etc. MSNP15
> was finally merged to im.pidgin.pidgin this morning. Currently it is also
> the default MSN plugin, and I hope it stays that way, but it might be
> changed if anyone objects to it.
>
> This would not have been possible without the work of Elliott, the two
> Summer of Code students, one other crazy patch writer (known as Masca on
> #pidgin), our XMPP Voice and Video Summer of Code student for this year
> (known as Maiku on #pidgin), and Dimmuxx and other Adium users' testing. I'm
> sure there are a number of other people I've forgotten to mention who have
> made contributions to this progress, and I apologize. My memory isn't what
> it used to be. To all these people who have helped with the long road of
> updated MSN protocol support, I give well-deserved thanks.
>
> So what does all this mean? Well, simply, a lot of the feature requests
> we've been getting are finally resolved. Ideally we also will stop seeing
> people asking why they don't receive offline MSN messages, why they can't
> message while invisible, and why they can't see personal messages. For these
> reasons alone, I can't wait for the release of Pidgin 2.5.0!
>
> reference: http://planet.pidgin.im/
>
>
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