[OTR-dev] libotr and pidgin-otr 3.1.0-preview2 available

Greg Troxel gdt at ir.bbn.com
Fri Jul 27 19:51:25 EDT 2007


I don't mean to rant, but I'm trying to package pidgin-otr and having a
harder time than seems necessary.  I'm experienced enough at packaging
that I suspect others are too.

1) at http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/ it says that there is

   OTR plugin for Pidgin (formerly known as gaim)

and the file is http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/gaim-otr-3.0.0.tar.gz But
this file is a plugin for gaim (1.5), not for pidgin (which to me
implies 2.0).  The headline should indicate clearly that this is for
gaim 1.5.X.

2) There is no obvious way to find out the list of files available for
download.  Simply putting them all in
http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/download/ and enabling indexing would help
a lot.

3) It seems that pidgin has been out for a while, so it never occured to
me that there is no released otr plugin based on the beta one that's
been around for ever.  If this is really the case the top-level web page
should explain it - I expected to find pidgin-otr-3.0.0 and haven't been
able to.

4) I found Ian's message about preview2, and downloaded it.  It would be
good to use 3.1.0a2 to follow normal conventions for prerelease
software, and to have the directory name match the version name, so that
packaging software that assumes it will match won't need adjusting.
Right now 3.1.0-preview2 unpacks into 3.1.0.

5) pidgin-otr-3.1.0 seems to need libotr-3.1.0.  While this might really
be necessary, it would be really nice to decouple gui issues from core
protocol issues, and to only depend on released libraries - even for
unreleased plugins.  It's awkward to test pidgin-otr-3.1.0 while not
breaking gaim-otr-3.0.0 on the same system.  (I'd hope that 3.1.0 is API
and ABI compatible, but you'll forgive me for not being confident in
this given all of the above.)

<pause to update libotr to 3.1.0-preview2, allowing for changing the
name and pointing pkgsrc at the unpacked location>


I really appreciate all the work that's gone into OTR, and I use it
daily.  Sorry if I'm sounding cranky, but a bit more care in making
things packaging friendly and being careful to avoid confusion would
make it more likely that more people can get OTR more easily.


The good news is that after updating libotr (which only needed a version
change and a single new .h), and adjusting the former gaim-otr package
for pidgin-otr (naming changes only), the plugin works.  This is on
NetBSD-current on i386 with pretty recent gnome/gtk/glib/etc and pidgin
2.0.1.  Just to be clear, this is a full test of the plugin as built by
the packaging system, and my only real issues were 4 and 5 above, both
quite minor.

    Greg



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