Facebook in Pidgin

[Matej Cepl]

On 2008-11-21, 04:42 GMT, Casey Ho wrote:
> How about this:  Keep Facebook in plugin land as it is now, but 
> make a move to support it publicly on the front page and other 
> locations.  Label it experimental, give Mark or somebody else 
> from Pidgin commit access, clear out the bug list, and cut down 
> the number of features to keep it simple.

Hi, if I may chime in,

I totally agree with the above. I am a maintainer (now just 
co-maintainer) of purple-facebookchat package in Fedora (Linux 
distro) and my experience with the plugin strongly suggests that 
keeping it out of the main tree but officially supported is the 
best decision. The same applies IMHO to purple-microblog plugin, 
BTW.

Both of these plugins may get eventually useless. I believe that 
Facebook will eventually make XMPP gateway -- of course, the big 
question is when. I believe also, that either twitter will reopen 
its XMPP support, or that openmicroblogging servers, namely 
laconi.ca, will be able to communicate with twitter. That means 
IMHO that neither of these should be set in the stone of being in 
the main tree.

Other reason is that both of them are highly crashy. Whereas, 
pidgin itself seems to be pretty stable these days, I get at 
least one crash a day from either of these. I don't mean anything 
bad against the developers of these plugins -- obviously, these 
are young programs in quite rapid state of development, and their 
reaction of the crash reports was usually pretty good, but they 
are IMHO in totally different class than the rest of the 
piding/purple and they still require releases like every week or 
so. And of course, facebookchat being a webscrapping technology, 
may require updates often anyway (although Facebook seems to be 
pretty good with not breaking the API that much).

Best,

Matěj