Facebook in Pidgin

[John Bailey]

Casey Ho wrote:
> I think XMPP  is a case of the cat already out of the bag because other
> chat clients already publicly support Facebook's hacked up interface.
> Pidgin is slowly bleeding users elsewhere, most notably Digsby.

That's perfectly fine.  A number of Digsby's UI decisions are less than
intelligent, and people like it.  Let them use Digsby.

> 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.

My opinion is that the front page is completely out of the question.  I'd prefer
not seeing it in the FAQ either, but that *is* a wiki and I've given up caring
about the FAQ since it was turned into an intentionally overcomplicated mess of
nested tables of contents.  So, stuff it in the FAQ.

>  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.

If one of our developers is insane enough to waste time on it, I guess there's
nothing I can do about it, but I would like to point out that we have a LOT of
bugs and patches of our own to take care of before we go fixing other people's
code.  The old adage "sweep your own doorstep first" seems to me to reasonably
apply here.

> Pidgin has a great plugin system.  Why not take better advantage of it
> and avoid the whole release problem?  (I don't think any plugin has ever
> been featured like this, but if there's ever an argument for an
> exception, this is the time.)

You're right, we've never featured a plugin on the front page.  I don't think we
should, either.  We do mention switchspell, List Handler, Guifications, and
possibly other plugins in the FAQ, and this seems to be good enough for the
people who actually bother to read.  It should work well enough in this case too.

John

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