[OTR-dev] Inconsistent message state between peers using pidgin otr plugin

[Ian Goldberg]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 11:19:31AM -0300, João Paulo Rechi Vita wrote:
> Hello OTR devs,
> 
> I'm add OTR support for XMPP on Telepathy/Empathy and using the pidgin
> plugin as a reference.

Great!

> While testing my code against pidgin I've
> notice some strange behavior and when verifying using pidgin against
> pidgin I've found a way to put one peer into "Unverified" and the
> other into "Not Private" state. These are the steps to reproduce:
> 
> 1. Establish an unverified session between the peers;
> 2. One peer goes offline;
> 3. While offline, the same peer closes pidgin;
> 4. The same peer re-opens pidgin and goes back online;
> 
> At this point the peer which has closed/re-opened pidgin is in the
> "Not Private" state, but the other peer (which remained opened all the
> time) didn't received any notification that the OTR session has been
> finished. If any of them tries to send a message, an error occurs.
> 
> Is this an expected behavior?

What error exactly are you seeing?  If the just-reopened client sends a
message first, the other side will just report that an unexpected
unencrypted message was received, but that's not an error per se.  If
the other client sends a message first, an encrypted message will be
received by the "not private" side, which will report the receipt of an
unreadable encrypted message, trigger OTR to start up again, and the
other side should resend the message.

> Thanks for your time,
> 
> PS: I've sent another message a few days ago with a patch for
> libotr.pc, did it ever made to the list?

I didn't see it.  Just in case, please resend directly to me and to Rob
Smits <rdfsmits at cs.uwaterloo.ca>.

Thanks,

   - Ian