Inclusion of MXit plugin into Pidgin

[Mark Doliner]

On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Ethan Blanton<elb at pidgin.im> wrote:
> Pieter Loubser spake unto us the following wisdom:
>> I have tested the MXit plugin with the latest Pidgin 2.6.1 and the
>> latest MXit plugin code is compatible with 2.6. Looking at the responses
>> we received thus far there were no objections against the inclusion of
>> the MXit plugin. If there are no other concerns with this I would really
>> like to start integrating the plugin into the main Pidgin branch.
>
> I have concerns which echo some other concerns which were indeed raised.
>
> The mxit plugin causes a LOT of support traffic and noise.  It seems
> to fail a lot, and we get tons of support requests because of this.
> If someone from mxit is not willing to take on the burden of these
> support requests, and improve the plugin to reduce their frequency, I
> am absolutely opposed to including it.  We have enough marginal
> protocol plugins as it is.  :-P

I'm concerned about this as well.  I'm worried that if the mxit plugin
is included the number of these questions to the support mailing list
will increase, and it doesn't seem like anyone currently subscribed to
the support list knows how to answer them.

I suspect that a few changes can be made to the plugin to make it more
clear how to use it.  Does the plugin set a callback for the
get_account_text_table prpl function?  If not, it might be helpful to
do so.  This function causes Pidgin to display a hint on what type of
value is expected (a phone number, I guess?)

Maybe the plugin could be more tolerant of variations in the username?
 Are hyphens allowed or required?  Maybe both forms could be accepted?
 Should the number be entered with the country code at the beginning?
etc.

And are error messages extremely informative?  i.e. if an MXit server
is down for maintenance does the user get a helpful error message?  Or
if their username is incorrectly formatting does the error tell the
user exactly what's wrong?

Some example user questions from July and August:
http://pidgin.im/pipermail/support/2009-July/004499.html
http://pidgin.im/pipermail/support/2009-July/004572.html
http://pidgin.im/pipermail/support/2009-July/004637.html
http://pidgin.im/pipermail/support/2009-July/004645.html
http://pidgin.im/pipermail/support/2009-July/004654.html
http://pidgin.im/pipermail/support/2009-July/004736.html
http://pidgin.im/pipermail/support/2009-August/004882.html
http://pidgin.im/pipermail/support/2009-August/004999.html
http://pidgin.im/pipermail/support/2009-August/005015.html

-Mark