[Pidgin] #8999: Support wicd for network availability notifications

[Pidgin]

#8999: Support wicd for network availability notifications
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 Reporter:  mavior                                        |        Owner:           
     Type:  enhancement                                   |       Status:  new      
Milestone:  Patches welcome                               |    Component:  libpurple
  Version:  2.4.3                                         |   Resolution:           
 Keywords:  suspend hangs network interface not updating  |  
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Comment(by darkrain42):

 Replying to [comment:4 johntyree]:
 > It can't be made application independent? Isn't this kind of thing
 supposed to be what DBUS is all about? It seems like we should be able to
 just watch for network status updates on the session bus and act
 accordingly.

 If there is a common (freedesktop.org) "network manager" dbus protocol,
 then yes.  But Pidgin isn't the place to implement that (it needs to be
 supported in the daemons).

 > Beyond that, I think the ping solution is an excellent and simple one.
 We can just ping the logon servers. If they don't respond, we go offline
 for that particular account and continue pinging every few minutes to see
 if they come back. Is there a reason we can't implement that?

 A few issues: if you're talking about ICMP pings, there are plenty of
 places that firewall these completely (which is stupid, but common).  Even
 non-ICMP pings has issues, as the login servers being unresponsive does
 not correlate with having lost network connectivity (or even the service
 being down), since plenty of protocols (OSCAR comes to mind) use
 connections to entirely different servers post-auth.

 Implementing application-level pings (what the XMPP prpl does) is
 reasonable/possible, but outside the scope of this ticket, which is
 specifically about adding support for wicd to libpurple.  I also cannot
 speak as to which, if any, of the non-XMPP prpls *do* have these sorts of
 timeouts, though I'll point out that XMPP's application level pings are
 not without issues (mostly some XMPP servers violate the specs and do not
 respond to all IQ stanzas (a core MUST), despite the connection being up
 -- I suspect this would be problematic in other protocols).  In fact,
 there was a problem a few years ago with the Yahoo servers booting
 libpurple clients for pinging more than *once an hour*, which wouldn't
 help your use case much.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/8999#comment:5>
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