msimprpl status report

[Jeff Connelly]

Hello everyone, I had a great time working on the MySpaceIM protocol
plugin ( http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/MySpaceIM ) for Pidgin over
summer, although I haven't had much time to continue working on it
after summer, as school took over. Fortunately, this has now changed,
as I've been able to register for an independent study course for
Winter 2008 in which I can spend some time working on fixing bugs in
this code. My focus this quarter will be on bug fixes and quality,
although I may also work on additional features as time permits. I
won't be able to spend as much time as I did over summer, but
hopefully I'll be able to fix a good amount of bugs that will make
msimprpl a better protocol plugin.

Professor Clinton Staley ( http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~cstaley/ )
will be my adviser at Cal Poly. I'll be meeting with him on campus and
occasionally sending out status reports describing my progress. Sean
Egan will be my adviser on the Pidgin side.

This is the first status report. This week I setup my development
environment and re-familiarized myself with the Pidgin source code.
It's been a while.

I worked on ticket http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/2802 , testing
Jaywalker's patch, fixing a warning and cleaning it up for submission
into the source tree. This patch implements msim_normalize, which
converts multiple forms of usernames that all mean the same thing into
one, canonical username. This allows you to IM not only tom, but also
TOM, or Tom, with the same effect. It also allows referring to users
by user ID, but only if the buddy is on your buddy list. For example,
you can now IM 6221, and your conversation will show up as with tom,
if he is on your buddy list. Credit     to Jaywalker for implementing
this.

I'm working on getting my Monotone private key from my old compter, so
I can commit these changes to the repository. Planning on getting it
done by next week.

http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/3976 came in from a user (a problem
with buddy usernames containing extended characters) and it may be
solved by #2802 because of the addition of the normalization function,
which includes UTF-8 normalization. We're awaiting more information
from the submitter.

I filed http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4631 to address the issue of
normalizing user IDs of users not on your buddy list. msim_normalize()
is expected to return immediately, but looking up user IDs is done
with msim_lookup_user(), which sends a request to the server and calls
a given callback function when a reply is received, so a fix may
require changes to libpurple or some other enhancements. Anyone have
any advice here? How can the prpl_info->normalize function request and
wait for information from the server, without blocking the whole
program?

I updated http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/2803 with information on
all the known builds of the official MySpaceIM client. Currently
msimprpl identifies itself as 1.0.697.0, although the newest official
client is as 1.0.745.0. The main feature in the newest version of the
official client appears to be the addition of Skype.

I am looking into http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/3237 , a memory
leak in msimprpl that looks to be the biggest problem with the plugin
at the moment. I haven't been able to reproduce it. Anyone that has is
invited to add a comment to http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/3237
explaining how they encountered the problem. This is definitely one
bug that I want to get fixed.

Look forward to fixing as many bugs as I can in these coming months.
If anyone has encountered an unreported bug in msimprpl, feel free to
file report at http://developer.pidgin.im/newticket?owner=jeff;keywords=msimprpl;component=MySpace
with as much information as possible. Thanks!

-Jeff Connelly