FESCo Meeting Summary for 2008-11-05

[Paul Wouters]

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.

- 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.
- It is prone to crashes and freezes (once every couple of days)
- Somewhere it lost "reconnect all accounts", and I need to click reconnect per
   account.
- 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.
- 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.
- Leaves a mess in /tmp/
- Combined user accounts lead to strange things due to pidgin seemingly picking
   randomly whch user account to use, which causes problems with OTR.
- 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.
- Buddylist window icon at the bottom turns blue ("attention") grabbing when
   some event has fixed itself, leaving me to wonder what requires my attention.
- 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. 
- Once every couple of months, some accounts turns to "unvisible" (might be an
   MSN/AIM protocol thing, not something pidgin can help)
- 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)

For the features I am using, I've mostly seen a downgrade in usability
since gaim2 beta, and a buggier client. I still use it because I think it is
the best client out there right now, but I'd jump ship if there was another
more usable client, though for me the OTR plugin is a mandatory feature I want
to have. I can't switch to empathy without it.

Paul