[OTR-users] Making a distribution of Gaim with OTR preinstalled

Ian Goldberg ian at cypherpunks.ca
Sat Dec 17 13:04:07 EST 2005


On Sat, Dec 17, 2005 at 05:41:35PM +0000, Shane M. Coughlan wrote:
> Now, an issue we've noticed during our OTR test conversations is that
> long messages passing through Yahoo! (and possibly other networks)
> sometimes generate a loop.  Gaim complains its a badly formed message,
> and it attempts (infinite loop) to resend the message.  It's a little
> annoying, and does not occur when OTR is not enabled.

The "right" way to solve this is with fragmentation.  gaim-otr-3.0.0
included support for assembling fragments, but not for generating them.

There are two hard parts of fragmenting long messages:

1. How do you know what size of fragment to use?
2. Some networks have a rate-limiter that trips when you try to send
   messages (i.e. fragments) too quickly.

The only plausible solution to #1 is icky (hard-code maximum sizes for
each known network, ugh).  The IM networks simply don't in general provide
enough information to determine the maximum size at runtime.

#2 is really a bug in gaim: it's already got code that's supposed to
automatically throttle outgoing messages, based on the networks'
reported rate limits, but, last I checked, it didn't work.  Maybe the
new gaim-2 has fixed it, though.

It's definitely something we're keeping in mind, though.  This is
discussed from time to time on the otr-dev list.

   - Ian



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