Pidgin (was Re: FESCo Meeting Summary for 2008-11-05)

[Stu Tomlinson]

On Fri, 2008-11-07 at 21:35 -0500, Paul Wouters wrote:
> On Sat, 8 Nov 2008, Stu Tomlinson wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 11:44 PM, Paul Wouters <paul at xelerance.com> wrote:
> >> And I do hate pidgin with a vengance.
> >
> > May I ask why?
> 
> I've CC:ed the fedora list, though you gave me a private reply, because I
> thought the large list of bugs might be useful to someone. Hope that's okay.

Fine, but I think bugzilla is a better place for bugs to be reported.

> - It is the 2nd largest memory consuming application running (after firefox)
>    using up 10% of my total memory:
>     6698 paul      20   0  843m  96m  15m S  0.0  9.6  16:43.17 pidgin
>    And I am not a super consumer, only 25 friends and 5 irc channels online now.

That's certainly unacceptable. There have been some reports of high
memory utilization but I have been unable to reproduce such high numbers
or track down any significant leaks recently. It is possible this is
caused by 3rd party plugins, I'd ask you to try disabling OTR to see if
it improves things but I suspect you don't want to do that :) What other
plugins do you use?

For comparison this is my current utilization:
 9315 stu       20   0  164m  52m  21m S    0  2.6  84:29.60 pidgin

That's with 17 accounts online on various protocols, ~200 buddies, 4
chat channels and 6 IM conversations open, and it's been running for 14
days.

> - It is prone to crashes and freezes (once every couple of days)

Have you reported bugs with backtraces for these?

> - Somewhere it lost "reconnect all accounts", and I need to click reconnect per
>    account.

This should not be necessary, as accounts should automatically reconnect
without user intervention, unless they disconnected for reasons Pidgin
determines are not automatically resolvable (such as incorrect
password). What sort of disconnection results in the accounts being in
this state?

> - Somewhere it lost the ability to be clever and allow typing when the 'focus'
>    was on the receiving part of a conversation window. Now that typing is lost
>    until you click on the small input box.

I can't reproduce that here.

> - Somewhere between gaim-beta 2.0 and pidgin it lost all concepts of
>    workspaces, resulting in my buddy list being unmovable from the screen
>    I started from (often with my conversation screen stuck in another workspace)
>    This results in some really crappy things. If my buddy list is in workspace 1
>    and I am working in worspace 2, and someone initiates a talk this happens. If
>    I then later want to talk to someone else, i have to double flip through
>    workspaces (or move one of the windows manually to the other workspace).
>    The old gaim I could just left click the top icon twice to move the buddy list
>    from one workspace to the other.

That is indeed annoying - unfortunately it is not something that changed
in Pidgin, but something that changed in the DE or WM or something else.
I'll try to dig into what it is and see if we can work around it in
Pidgin.

> - Leaves a mess in /tmp/

What sort of mess? I am not aware of anything Pidgin puts in /tmp - Gaim
used to a long time ago before we switched to using DBUS for remote
control.

> - Combined user accounts lead to strange things due to pidgin seemingly picking
>    randomly whch user account to use, which causes problems with OTR.

Pidgin picks the most 'available' buddy within a contact to send an IM,
if buddies are determined to be equally available, the 1st one listed in
the expanded contact is used. Drag and drop can be used to re-arrange
them.

> - The file transfer function is completely unreliable and often fails silently,
>    eg the other end does not even see you're trying to send them a file.

File transfer functionality varies by protocol, and also depends on what
client the other end is using. I agree it is not perfect. Can you be
more specific about what protocol(s) you see this on?

> - Buddylist window icon at the bottom turns blue ("attention") grabbing when
>    some event has fixed itself, leaving me to wonder what requires my attention.

This sounds like a bug - did you file a bug?

> - When i have more tabs open then fit in the window, and I'm at the right most
>    tab, and I got a new mesage in a tab that's scrolled off screen at the left,
>    I can only go there by going through the tabs, causing them to lose the 'unread'
>    state. 

You can right click on any tab to see a list of all tabs and jump direct
to the one you want.

> - Once every couple of months, some accounts turns to "unvisible" (might be an
>    MSN/AIM protocol thing, not something pidgin can help)

I haven't heard of this happening - did you file a bug?

> - irc handling of nicknames when briefly bouncing is bad. You'll fight with your
>    own old nick, and with freenode you then lose the ability to privmsg.
>    (not sure if that is fixiable in a client, not really pidgin's fault probably)

There is a plugin in the purple plugin pack called 'IRC Helper' that can
manage ghosting of nicks and authenticating to Nickserv
(yum install purple-plugin_pack) 

Regards,


Stu.