Use case for per-protocol icons

[Etan Reisner]

On Mon, Aug 06, 2007 at 11:34:28PM -0400, Josh Williams wrote:
> On 8/6/07, Ethan Blanton <elb at pidgin.im> wrote:
> > This is *precisely* what I'm talking about, yes!  If you don't
> > understand the following argument, then this is absolutely the source
> > of the disconnect, and we simply believe that you are wrong, plain and
> > simple.  The user should not have to KNOW that MSN uses nudge and
> > Yahoo! uses nudge -- the user should simply say "I want to get my
> > friend's attention", and Pidgin should handle "nudging" or "buzzing";
> > these names are essentially arbitrary labels for the same thing, which
> > differ only because the protocol servers have a meaningless difference
> > in terminology.
>
> No, because very few protocols support this. That's my point.

That's unimportant, if more than one protocol supports it (or even if just
one does but it can be implemented in a way that others could use it if
they get support later) we are more than happy to have a way to do it. The
fact that you haven't understood this is a large part of why we have been
having such a large problem communicating about this issue with you and
all the other people who have been making your arguments. Please, please,
stop just reacting and start listening, it will make all of our lives
easier and more pleasant.

> > Yeah, that's a terrible idea, a waste of time, and a waste of
> > resources.  You should at least use libpurple as-is, as an installed
> > library, as, e.g., Adium does.  Anything else is lost effort.  That
> > said, if you do use monotone, or another capable distributed VCS,
> > changes to libpurple could conceivably be ported back and forth
> > without contortionist effort, if there were anything worthwhile to
> > move in the "back" direction.
>
> That's still to be worked out (I've written very little code so far.
> I'm mainly just in the idea stage atm). There are a few things that I
> want to change about libpurple and finch, most of which you would not
> want changed for pidgin. So I'm still trying to decide how I'm going
> to deal with that.

What sort of changes?

	-Etan