msimprpl status update

[Jeff Connelly]

Status update for the MySpaceIM Protocol Plugin for libpurple, known
as msimprpl.

Since the last status report on 2008-01-26, I filed 8 bugs and closed
6 bugs (after fixing by myself or applying & verifying fixes from
someone else).

http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4140 is a neat enhancement, adding
MySpaceIM to the list of protocols that libpurple recognizes as
allowing you to tell what music your buddies have playing (along with
Jabber and MSN). Pidgin shows a music note next to these buddies.
Msimprpl already had this information, but #4140 makes it available to
libpurple using the "tune" status. However, you currently can't listen
in on this music. I filed http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4766 to
track the enhancement of adding this feature. The official client lets
you click the music note to do this, but libpurple doesn't seem to
provide any mechanism for allowing prpls to register a callback for
when the music note is clicked. I filed
http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4776 to keep track of this possible
enhancement.

Filed http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4775 to track an enhancement
to allow users to invite buddies that are not on MySpaceIM. MySpaceIM
has the curious feature of allowing you to add buddies to your buddy
list that are on MySpace, but not MySpaceIM. Msimprpl can't currently
tell the difference (that is http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4689 )
but a new status will probably be added when this part of the protocol
is reverse-engineered.

As per Sean's suggestion, I converted the unofficial MySpaceIM
protocol documentation from its old page on Trac at
http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/MsimProtocolSpec to the IM Freedom
MediaWiki at http://imfreedom.org/wiki/index.php/MySpaceIM. The main
advantages here are that a) MediaWiki has better and more powerful
wiki syntax and b) MediaWiki lets you edit each section individually,
so you won't have to find the section you want to edit within a large
and unruly text edit field. This all means the protocol spec is more
likely to be updated and improved.

Applied and verified two performance fixes from Oliver,
http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4737 and
http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4790.

MySpace seems to have changed their mind a few times about what is an
acceptable password length. Some time ago, one user reported they
couldn't login with their 11-character password and filed
http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4369 . Now MySpace won't let you
change your password to a length of over 10 characters, so this
shouldn't be a problem for new users. I applied a change based on
Jaywalker's patch that warns users if their logins fails and they have
>10-character passwords, suggesting that they change their password at
a specified URL. If anyone has an existing account with a password
longer than 10 characters and would like to help me find out what is
going on here, try entering only the first 10 characters of your
password and feel free to report whether the login succeeds/fails at
http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4369, or email me off-list. If it
works I can have msimprpl truncate passwords to 10 characters, so
you'll be able to use your full passwords without problems--however I
can't test this myself because MySpace doesn't allow you to change
your password to greater than 10 characters.

Ran into http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4808 , a crash when opening
Preferences in Pidgin due to an older version of the Gtk+ runtime
installed (2.6.0-rc1), as TiEmu 3.02 requires. This is unfortunate
because it means I can't run TiEmu and Pidgin on the same machine, but
probably the best resolution is to have TiEmu use a newer version of
Gtk+. Submitted a bug to the TiEmu team about this.

Lastly, there is the attention GUI, submitted in a patch by nok to
http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/2788 . This is pretty cool because
it is a generic interface to the functionality offered by different
protocols under different names: zap, nudge, buzz. We already had an
API but #2788 adds a menu item to access it. It doesn't yet allow
sending multiple kinds of attention commands, for example MySpaceIM
has not only zap, but torch, punk, etc., (tracked by
http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4810 ) and doesn't have an icon yet
( http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4809 ) but nok's patch implements
most of the attention API functionality. However, changing the menu
item structures breaks the ABI, so this change will have to wait until
we can do that.

That's about it since last time. Next up I plan on taking a look at
the group sorting bugs in msimprpl.

-Jeff