Pidgin Last.fm Plugin / News: Recent posts

Dear users,

today I inform you that this project is officially discontinued. MusicTracker and YuLast.fm are out there, and this plugin needs a lot of work done.

Thanks for your support during the proejct's lifetime!

This week, I released v0.4a of the plugin, fixing some error message issues and implementing mor of the Last.fm API 2.0.

Go mad testing!

Due to a user's bug report we just found out that Audioscrobbler is finally publishing "now playing" information through the webservices. This renders the "ago" joker useless but enables the plugin to do what it was originally meant to do.

The "ago" information will always be wrong when listening to music, though it will be right when stopped. This will be fixed in the next release!... read more

This Pdgin plugin displays information from your Last.fm / Audioscrobbler profile in your user info on the various IM networks Pidgin supports. The most important information might be the recently scrobbled song.

I just fired out a new version of the plugin, still written in Perl. It is a release to make waiting for the rewrite easier for users and implements new features like the Last.fm 2.0 webservices (allowing more users to retrieve data) and more info sets that can be displayed.... read more

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.... read more

By now, we have quite a few issues with the plugin. For an instance, there is the lack of packagers and distribution engineers. And as of Pidgin 2.5.0, the plugin does not even show up in the plugin list.

As SF.net has managed to get the FRS intact again, my hopes towards the future of the plugin have become bigger. I conclude that there will be an entirely healthy environment when v0.4 of the plugin is released, which will be in the first weeks of November.... read more

I came back from my holiday to find out that things have not become better. On the contrary, they are even getting worse.

Not only that the SF.net staff did not do anything on my bug against the FRS except for raising the priority to 9, but now I can't even seem to fetch my project statistics ...

As the OpenSuSE build service still fails while building my packages (and this is a Build Service bug ...), I can't do anything but wait ...

At the moment, we have problems with packaging and with the SourceForge File Release System.

In the meantime, all users are recommended to use the .tar.gz file, replacing the Perl script manually on Windows or overriding the old version on Linux (by placing the new Perl script in ~/.purple/plugins)!

I just released version 0.3b in the FRS. It is mostly a bug fix release, as I am not including new features before the first stable release.

Everyone should test, test, test, under all conditions that occur to him or her, and report everything that looks like a bug!

It has been quite a long time since the last news from the Pidgin Last.fm plugin as there is not much that I want to change before the first stable release.

However, one main problem is the lack of packagers - we need packagers for RPM on the various Linux distributions, e.g. OpenSuSE, Fedora and Mandriva. Mandriva already accepted my package, and SuSE will soon do so.

Gentoo should be fine as well, but the developers do not seem to be very quick recently.... read more

The packaging issue on x64 systems should be solved now.

There was nothing to change for non-RPM distributions. These, however, seem to make a quite big deal of having seperate library directories for architectures, while others just symlink them ...

The various Linux packages provided for the plugin are for 32-bit systems only, as the library path is different on x64.

Please DO NOT use the packages on x64 and prefer using the tarball!

I just uploaded an RPM package for version 0.3a to the FRS. This should ease things for Fedora, SuSE and Mandriva users.

Have a lot of fun ...

The 0.3 version caused Pidgin to crash upon exit in some cases, although we thought the problem was fixed. The Linux packages are already out, the Windows installer package will be added later.

The error only seems to occur on Windows, but you never know, so I chose to update all platform packages.

Just a few minutes ago, I published version 0.3 of the Pidgin Last.FM plugin.

As I already mentioned on Saturday, all users are encouraged to upgrade because things were really broken in v0.2. You might experience data loss when using v0.2 because Pidgin cannot shutdown cleanly with the plugin enabled!

Of course, any feedback is still welcome - feel free to post any comments you like - well, as long as they cope with the project ;) ...

After fixing two important bugs and improving some things, like proxy functionality, I am planning on releasing a new test version on Monday, 21 April.

All users are encouraged to update, as the current version causes Pidgin to never exit cleanly!