[Pidgin-lastfm-support] Release of v0.4 delayed - Complete rewrite

[Dominik G. <nat...@gm...>]

Hi users,

I'm sorry to inform you that the release of pidgin-lastfm version 0.4, which
I announced for next week, has to be delayed for a while due to several bad
issues. To explain this shortly:

Last month, Pidgin 2.5.0 has been released to the public. While this version
contained many bugfixes and improvements, the crew also chose to upgrade the
Perl API in such a way that it will only work with Perl >=5.10. Well, the
problem now is that until today, few Linux distributions have Perl 5.10 in
their stable branches, so users have to do quite nasty stuff to their
systems in order to get Perl working in Pidgin again. Windows users should
be fine here as ActivePerl are, to my knowledge, providing Perl 5.10.

Once Perl 5.10 goes into some distributions, we could easily let
pidgin-lastfm depend on it by means of package management. However, it
appears that the Pidgin crew are not only doing heavy upgrades, but also
breaking part of the Perl API from time to time. The Perl API works through
some strange overlay of the C API noone really understands, as datallah,
experienced user and developer of the Perl part of Pidgin, once said to me
on the Pidgin support channel. In version 2.5.0+, they for once decided to
break the HTTP fetcher in a way that it will crash Pidgin every other time
song information is retrieved ...

As I am not willing to go on that way, finding workarounds and having
endless discussions with the support crew and my users who get angry with
their plugin not working, I am rewriting the entire codebase in C and then
distributing it just like any other Pidgin plugin. This will ease things
especially for the plugin users, as it does not really make any difference
for me as I have to go through all this C stuff once again after laying it
down a logn time ago ;) ...

While we are rewriting the Pidgin Last.fm plugin, we are also adapting to
the Last.fm API version 2.0, which will allow us to at last retrieve 'real'
now-playing information (you know, the thing this software initially was
intended to do but never did ;)) and even include some collaborative music
experience stuff, like retrieving song and artist information in real-time
in chats and stuff like that, let's just see what we will find ...

I can't tell when the work will be done as this means a hell of a mess for
developers, testers and packagers, so please be patient while we do our best
at gettign a new and shiny version of the plugin out to you.Remember you can
still use pidgin-lastfm version 0.3b in any Pidgin version, given that you
have Perl >=5.10 installed ...

Regards,
Nik