Thoughts on QQ Situation

[SuperMMX]

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Hi, "Daniel Atallah" <daniel.atallah at gmail.com> :

On Tue, 20 May 2008 21:25:36 -0400
"Daniel Atallah" <daniel.atallah at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's pretty clear that at this point the QQ prpl is unmaintained.
> 
> Based on some bug reports and people in #pidgin, my impression is that
> it doesn't work reliably.
> 
> There are 4 QQ patches in the tracker, 2 of them are quite large. 3 of
> them are from the same person.
> It doesn't look like these are likely to get evaluated any time soon
> simply because nobody is capable of doing it.  I don't think that is
> fair to the developer who has clearly put forward a lot effort on
> these patches.

As Ka-Hing Cheung (khc) mentioned before, the big patches come from
the same person, who created a google group[1] to discuss the development.
And it seems that Darcs is used as the DVCS rather than Monotone, and 
is not publicly available.

[1] OpenQ: http://groups.google.com/group/openq/  (in Chinese)

> I see 3 options:
>    1 - Find a new maintainer.  With the size of the apparent QQ
> userbase, surely there is someone capable
> plugin.and interested in stepping forward.  Perhaps the author of the
> significant patches in the tracker is interested?
>    2 - Do nothing.  Patches will continue sit in tracker, bugs reports
> will continue to come in.
>    3 - Remove the QQ prpl from the tree.  Perhaps someone will pick it
> up and maintain it as a 3rd party
> 

In current situation, I suggest:

1) Review the current patch (or more following patches), make it 
   roughly workable. And
2) The patch writer takes the maintenance if he is willing to. 
   If he is not,  the QQ prpl can be removed from the default list, 
   but stay in the tree. And
3) Wait for some time, like six months, QQ still has no maintainer,
   at that time, it can be removed from the tree, and the original
   patch writer maintains it as 3rd party plugin (hope he will continue
   working on it). On the homepage, point to somewhere that provides 
   download.

> What are your thoughts?
> My current opinion is that the options are listed in order of
> preference, with the caveat that 2 and 3 are going to eventually
> switch positions.
> 
> -D
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Devel mailing list
> Devel at pidgin.im
> http://pidgin.im/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devel


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