Insomniac's FC gaim status report

[Warren Togami]

While I am unable to sleep despite taking a sleeping pill, I might as 
well give the status update about gaim in Fedora Core.

Late Wednesday night gaim-0.82 was released which resolves various 
security and crashing issues.  It was a very good release, but 
unfortunately upstream discovered a nasty crash that would lead to 3 
weeks of annoying duplicate reports and complaints.  In an admittedly 
unwise move 18 hours later they replaced the gaim-0.82 tarball silently 
fixing that one issue.  But I think they said it wasn't entirely fixed 
correctly.

This of course can lead to all kinds of confusion for us distributors, 
as Fedora and other Linux distributions had already issued updates with 
the original 0.82.  So we requested a 0.82.1 release which happened late 
Thursday.

Rawhide now has 0.82.1-1 which should work very well.  gaim-0.82-0.FCX 
released in updates has only one crash in the corner case of the user 
having open windows with buddy icons while they change the button 
display preferences.  Most users will probably never run into this 
problem.  In any case, I do not consider this issue to be reason enough 
to issue the already too frequent gaim updates.

In the future I am hoping to help gaim upstream establish a better 
formalized testing procedure, perhaps with release candidates with 
automated distribution of binaries to an army of eager testers.  It will 
take something like this in order to avoid many regressions that are 
always discovered after each gaim release.

We the Fedora community are well equiped to provide valuable feedback. 
I will probably be announcing a more rapidly changing gaim 
side-repository along with testing/reporting methodology documents later 
in the next upstream gaim development cycle.

I am also especially interested in hearing any suggestions from Fedora 
developers about ways to further integrate gaim into other desktop 
components, to provide a more smooth & cohesive desktop experience.

One example that needs help is in gaim + evolution integration. 
Currently the plugin is included in rawhide gaim, but disabled by 
default since it has been unstable in my limited testing.  Volunteer 
help is needed there to try it, and communicate with both gaim & 
evolution upstream to figure out how it can be fixed/improved.

Ok... might be able to actually sleep now...

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com