Insomniac's FC gaim status report

[Philip Wyett]

On Fri, 2004-08-27 at 13:10, Warren Togami wrote:
> 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

I am currently running the rawhide release rebuilt for FC1 and all is
sweet so far. Not so long ago I queried on the gaim devel list if gaim
prior to a release would issue RC's. This was declined by a senior gaim 
dev(s). gaim has their release way but it seems lately including the
0.82 release the dev responsible for the Fedora packages is taking a
release, spinning the rpm's and releasing them without any in "rawhide"
or even "testing" time. If gaim is unwilling to change we should
slightly step back from upstream and have at least some test time before
issuing updates.

Regards

-- 

Philip Wyett

Personal Email: philip at wyett.net
Website: http://www.wyett.net

Work email: pwyett at a-novo.co.uk
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