[OTR-users] Conflict with gaim-encryption plugin

[Greg Troxel]

I had the same problem, but I don't think "don't do that" is entirely
reasonable.

  Out of curiosity, is gaim-encryption useful in some way that gaim-otr
  isn't?  I've only used it briefly (mainly in diagnosing problems like
  this), but it seems that gaim-otr has a strict superset of the
  functionality of gaim-encryption.  Is there a reason for two people who
  have both to want to turn on gaim-encryption?

I would say that no, if both have OTR, gaim-encryption is not useful.
I installed gaim-encryption to test it when handling an upgrade PR for
gaim-encryption's pkgsrc entry, and ran into what seems like the same
problem.

I think the root of the problem is that there is opportunistic support
in both plugins.  OTR appends whitespace tags and negotiates, and I'm
not sure what gaim-encryption does.  But, if they are in the same
order (and reverse order on the way back) each should be able to
operate, with OTR setup messages being carried over gaim-encryption or
the other way around.  This wouldn't be useful in a crypto sense,
except that having a working conversation is more useful than not.

So, I think gaim needs plugin ordering tokens, so that there can be
consistent ordering for plugins across clients.  And then
gaim-encryption, or perhaps OTR, may need some help.

All that said, given that OTR is better than gaim-encryption and I
don't have any friends who use it and not OTR, I'm not inclined to
spend cycles on this, and I certainly wouldn't expect Ian to do so.

-- 
        Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com>