response to http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/414

[Etan Reisner]

On Sat, Jun 09, 2007 at 04:34:26PM -0500, Neal Rapoport wrote:
> Etan Reisner wrote:
> >On Fri, Jun 08, 2007 at 09:42:32PM -0500, Neal Rapoport wrote:
> >
> >>It's even useful on the buddy list like here where I have myself on the
> >>ME group... I use that to see which protocol's I'm on... SOmetimes I
> >>turn one off,  (just don't want to be bothered by certain folks), and I
> >>don't know which is on, unless I alias myself (on all my machines I run
> >>pidgin on) ...
> >>Also, this shows the different information from the different protocols.
> >>SAMPLE: http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/983/pidginrx0.jpg
> >>But if there's no plans to add it back, (even like I mentioned of
> >>folders of .png files like the other stuff is in), I can't do anything
> >>about it.
> >>Thanks
> >>Neal.
> >>
> >
> >The Accounts menu shows you which of your accounts is enabled and whether
> >they are online or offline, which solves exactly what you are talking
> >about without adding the useless protocol icons to the buddy list entries.
> >Not to mention the fact that a number of protocols don't even allow you to
> >add yourself to your buddy list so pidgin has to fake it because people
> >expect it (notably MSN and XMPP).
> >
> >	-Etan
> >
>
> Well obviously its not useless.  If you're saying that having to hover
> extra times often, and go into the menu's to do something which used to
> be always visible is useless, then Pidgin itself is probably useless
> according to your terms, since people can just install all the separate
> clients and use them to get the same results too!

The buddy list has a purpose, it is to allow you to locate, see the status
of, and interact with buddies of yours. The buddy list does not have the
purpose of allowing you to see the status of your accounts (though you can
abuse it to do this by adding yourself to your buddy list on the protocols
that support it and the ones pidgin fakes it for). There are appropriate
places for that sort of information, namely the accounts menu. And again,
the fact that the protocol icons in the buddy list allowed you to
distinguish between multiple copies of yourself was a side effect and not
the intended purpose of them, therefore it makes a poor reason to bring
them back because they are not very good at the job you wished for them to
have. Also, on a number of protocols pidgin stores the alias on the server
(namely, AIM and XMPP) so you don't need to set the alias up in as many
places as you might otherwise think.

One final thing, I don't know how many accounts you have and on how many
protocols, but I for one have multiple accounts on multiple protocols
(more than one per protocol) and as such even if I were to have the
protocol icons in a Me group, they would not be enough to uniquely
identify any specific account and as such they fail to function even were
I to believe that they did meet with your usage scenario.

With this email, I am done responding to further comments in this thread
unless they present new reasons as to why the protocol icons existing in
the buddy list is a useful feature.

	-Etan

P.S. Allow me also to say (for the who knows how many-eth time) that a
plugin could be written to bring this back if people chose to write one.