Does anybody know a nice program using libgaim for linux...?
Is anyone motivated to create one... I'd love to have something like Adium for my linux which would have a nice gtk user interface ! I like in some ways Kopete but I'd like something integrated in my Gnome desktop environment.
And as far as I know... this will not happen whithin the main Gaim project which I find very slow and very selfish (reading from the developpers on the forum...) Still waiting for a final version... one year of beta versions !!
Has anyone thought about this before, know things about doing this or existing stuff...??
Thanks a lot for your contributions !
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Yeah, shame on the developers for taking so much time to make a product that actually works. And shame on them for spending their own free time working on a product and then giving it to users for free.
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If you're satisfied in what you're doin, good for you !
You said somewhere else that anyone is free to do its own fork so I'm going that way...
Sorry if that annoys you !
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The fact that you want to write your own gaim frontend doesn't annoy me, the way you go about doing it does. It is one thing to stand up and say "I want to start my own gaim frontend, here are the design goals, who wants to join me? And thanks to the gaim team for even making this possible" and something entirely different to stand up and say "The gaim team is making me angry because they aren't doing what I want, who wants to join me in forking the project because they are slow and selfish. Stupid developers <grumble>". Your post was much closer to the latter than to the former, and *that* is what annoyed me about it.
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But the GAIM developers *are* selfish, very much so in fact, by their own admission. Surely you aren't upset at someone for pointing out a fact the you guys evidently take pride in? GAIM devs think of their users (and I quote, verbatim): "You provide us nothing but grief."
Indeed. Although I doubt it will do anything whatsoever to soften the cold, inky hearts of GAIM developers, I can't resist pointing something out. I'd like to offer, as an object lesson in reaping the rewards of not treating your users with contempt, the recent Amarok fundraiser:
In just a few weeks they've already almost met their goal of $5000 to offest hardware and bandwidth and dev conference travel costs for this year. I donated $50, personally, and was glad to do so. Of course, I would suggest that the success of this effort might have a lot to do with the fact that the amarok devs are generally communicative. But even more that that, they don't seem to loathe their users the way you guys do.
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my statement of the reality of your contribution makes me selfish, but your statement of your idea of my contribution does not make you selfish? I don't follow that logic.
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I see you've missed the point entirely. I have contributed: time, money, bug reports, and patches to a variety of open source projects over the last decade. I may not contribute these things to GAIM, but interestingly enough, none of these other projects espoused the dour and dim view of users that you do. I'll leave it as homework to draw your own conclusions from this.
As for logic, perhaps you need a refresher course. Whether or not I am selfish is irrelevant. The "but you are X too!" is not a logically defensible counter-argument to, well, anything. In any event I was not making an accusation, per se; I was attempting to faithfully summarize your stated philosophy regarding GAIM development (roughly: "we only do this for ourselves").
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Many people take offense at many things, that doesn't make all of them wrong. Your claim that I should draw conclusions based on your contributions to other projects and not gaim doesn't really lead to anything. Especially since gaim has never been in a position to accept money, which knocks out one of your methods, and I have no real idea what contributing 'time' means unless you mean answering bug reports and stuff like that. In which case the developers have that mostly in hand, with the occasional help of lurking users.
Whether you are or are not something is relevant when you are accusing others of being the same thing. "[Y]ou are X too" is not a defense as much as it is an indicator of the fact that your accusation holds much less weight.
Oh and while part of your message certainly could have been intended as merely a restating of a stated developer position. The parts that speak about 'cold, ink hearts' and the parts suggesting that we would horribly fail at a donation drive are not. Plenty of people have restated our position before without incident, the 'attacks' in your post were the problem, the same way the attacking nature of the original post was my issue and not the idea.
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my post was as logically valid as both of yours, which is to say really not valid at all: The fact that I'm here because I need something does not prove that I am selfish.
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Where did that quote come from? I don't recall seeing that myself. As to the truth of that statement, a random user who contributes nothing to the development of gaim and complains about bugs or slowness, by *definition* does provide nothing but grief, so whether that was a statement of fact or a pejorative is an important distinction.
And there is a difference between working on gaim because we want to and being selfish, if we were really selfish you wouldn't have it at all and I wouldn't bother spending my time talking to you. Since neither of those is true that should tell you something.
Without running our own donation drive I can't really assert this, but I will state that I fully believe that if gaim held such an event we would quite likely do as well if not better than amarok did. But since it is unlikely gaim is going to hold such an event it is hard to make that claim with anything other than just my belief behind it. (Also, and this is just for the record, any donation drive with a prize will likely do a good bit of business simply because of the prize, which is to say nothing about the reason most people donated but just a belief of mine in the way people work.)
Last thing, if, at any point anyone can point out anything concrete and specific that the gaim developers do that is mean-spirited, directly anti-user, or any other such 'evil' I would dearly like it pointed out. I very much doubt you will find any.
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libgaim will (finally) formally exist with the release of beta4, which will also come with 2 UIs, gaim (gtk) and gaim-text (ncurses). it has taken a massive amount of work to make this possible, almost none of which has been user-visible. That's why no other project has offered two UIs since the last time licq tried it.
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I've been lurking around here and using gaim for 4 of those years, I've never been anything other than happy with the outcome! I may get impatient, but that's because I know it can only get better. It can't be easy to do all of the things you developers do. Why any of you would do anything other than shrug off statements of selfishness is beyond me, if you were doing this for yourselves what would be the logic in releasing it publicly?
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If you want to work on better integration with GNOME, I'm all for that. I'm a Gaim developer and I spend quite a bit of time reviewing patches. However, I think it's unfair for you to say that "X is never going to happen because ..." when you haven't tried "X".
Submit some patches to do GNOME-integration things, and we'll see how that fits into the overall Gaim goals. For example, we don't want to sacrifice usability for people of other desktop environments, or people who don't use a desktop environment, to make Gaim more integrated with GNOME.
If your patches are rejected, I'd say then you could consider forking. It seems premature to talk about forking before you have any code.
For the record, many users of Gaim are a drain. They submit bug reports for things covered in teh FAQ. They submit duplicate bug reports. They ask for stupid features. This all contributes to developer animosity towards users and burn-out. However, the frustration that I've seen is generally limited to people who are being a drain, not people with real bugs, people with legitimate questions, people who want to help, etc.
We *do* code Gaim largely for ourselves. It's an open source project, so our incentive is to work on things we're interested in. However, many of us (definitely myself included) spend a LOT of time reading and responding to bug reports, reviewing patches, etc.
Regarding releases... What difference does it make if the release is a beta or a "final" release. I've been using the "beta" code for a long time, and it's mostly bug free. If it has bugs that annoy you, jump in and help fix them. Finally, keep in mind that the changes we've been introducing with 2.0.0 aren't all user-visible... Many things under the hood have been improved, which will help the project in the future.
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rlaager is exactly on target in pinpointing the types of users who have raised my fustration level so very high.
He's also exactly right in describing our policy for gnomish patches.
He's ALSO exactly right in looking at our releases. Sean would tell you that EVERY gaim release is a "beta" release. 90% of them have just been snapshots of cvs or subversion.
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Anonymous
-
2006-10-22
I don't usually support forking projects, but I'd whole-heartedly support a fork of gaim. To speak of beta code that is "mainly bug free" is a joke. Every beta of gaim 2.0 has created new bugs for me, and I don't consider any of them stable. 99% of them come as a side effect of new features. You've been beta for a year and you still haven't hit feature freeze?
1.5 is very stable, but it's just way too old. Since no respectable linux distro will package beta versions, most linux users will be stuck with 1.5 until hell freezes over and 2.0 is released officially.
I have never seen any open source project with such animosity towards users. ALL open-source projects live mainly on the efforts of volunteers, but in 99% of the cases they don't moan and complain about how much hard work they put in and how nobody appreciates it. I appreciate that I can IM with free software. Thank you for that. But, I don't appreciate the way you treat your users, and it's completely turned me off from contributing to the project in any way.
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most other projects have rather more limited contact with their users. Many projects do not even have a public irc channel where developers can be reliably found. I think this more limited contact is useful in maintaining goodwill amoung developers for their users.
I have been regularly insulted and abused for nearly every decision I have participated in and a good many I had no control over since the day I joined the gaim project. I have watched many developers go from feeling quite positively about our user base to hatred of them, a defensive reaction to the heaps of abuse we regularly get. I have even seen developers walk away and leave the project, because the abuse we get makes working on gaim cease to be fun.
I have had email addresses and IM contact info posted in the form of a personal ad on online-sex message boards as "retribution" for denying a feature request (the user in question boasted of the fact in an email to me).
I have had users attempt to threaten me with ceasing to use gaim if I do xyz, and other users threaten to cease using gaim if I do _not_ implement xyz.
It should be no wonder that we grow a dislike of users. As I type this list, inevitably recalling to mind hundreds of unpleasent experiences brought on by my continued participation in gaim, I rather wonder that we have been able to keep _any_ developers, that _all_ of us have not given up on the project.
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Actually, beta4 has fixed the issues of interoperability with gimp and GTK+ under windows (At least for me under XP). I have not found any other problems and it SEEMS to be quite stable. Granted, I have not loosed my teenagers on it yet...
It would really be nice to put an end to the pissing match that seems to be never ending between some of the folks on this forum and some of the developers.
My only complaints in the past have been about the length of time it was taking to fix the GTK+ issues and the somewhat dismissive attitude from some of the developers towards some of the more vocal forum participants.
One issue seems to be fixed. I think Sean made a huge gesture towards fixing the other by implementing the PlanetGAIM site. Now if someone besides Sean would post an occaisional update there instead of getting drawn into the bickering about who supports who on the forums, all would be well on the way to being at least civil again.
Thanks for the GTK+ fixes. You guys rock again!
Regards,
Bob
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Hi everybody !
Does anybody know a nice program using libgaim for linux...?
Is anyone motivated to create one... I'd love to have something like Adium for my linux which would have a nice gtk user interface ! I like in some ways Kopete but I'd like something integrated in my Gnome desktop environment.
And as far as I know... this will not happen whithin the main Gaim project which I find very slow and very selfish (reading from the developpers on the forum...) Still waiting for a final version... one year of beta versions !!
Has anyone thought about this before, know things about doing this or existing stuff...??
Thanks a lot for your contributions !
Yeah, shame on the developers for taking so much time to make a product that actually works. And shame on them for spending their own free time working on a product and then giving it to users for free.
If you're satisfied in what you're doin, good for you !
You said somewhere else that anyone is free to do its own fork so I'm going that way...
Sorry if that annoys you !
The fact that you want to write your own gaim frontend doesn't annoy me, the way you go about doing it does. It is one thing to stand up and say "I want to start my own gaim frontend, here are the design goals, who wants to join me? And thanks to the gaim team for even making this possible" and something entirely different to stand up and say "The gaim team is making me angry because they aren't doing what I want, who wants to join me in forking the project because they are slow and selfish. Stupid developers <grumble>". Your post was much closer to the latter than to the former, and *that* is what annoyed me about it.
But the GAIM developers *are* selfish, very much so in fact, by their own admission. Surely you aren't upset at someone for pointing out a fact the you guys evidently take pride in? GAIM devs think of their users (and I quote, verbatim): "You provide us nothing but grief."
Indeed. Although I doubt it will do anything whatsoever to soften the cold, inky hearts of GAIM developers, I can't resist pointing something out. I'd like to offer, as an object lesson in reaping the rewards of not treating your users with contempt, the recent Amarok fundraiser:
http://amarok.kde.org/
In just a few weeks they've already almost met their goal of $5000 to offest hardware and bandwidth and dev conference travel costs for this year. I donated $50, personally, and was glad to do so. Of course, I would suggest that the success of this effort might have a lot to do with the fact that the amarok devs are generally communicative. But even more that that, they don't seem to loathe their users the way you guys do.
my statement of the reality of your contribution makes me selfish, but your statement of your idea of my contribution does not make you selfish? I don't follow that logic.
I see you've missed the point entirely. I have contributed: time, money, bug reports, and patches to a variety of open source projects over the last decade. I may not contribute these things to GAIM, but interestingly enough, none of these other projects espoused the dour and dim view of users that you do. I'll leave it as homework to draw your own conclusions from this.
As for logic, perhaps you need a refresher course. Whether or not I am selfish is irrelevant. The "but you are X too!" is not a logically defensible counter-argument to, well, anything. In any event I was not making an accusation, per se; I was attempting to faithfully summarize your stated philosophy regarding GAIM development (roughly: "we only do this for ourselves").
Many people take offense at many things, that doesn't make all of them wrong. Your claim that I should draw conclusions based on your contributions to other projects and not gaim doesn't really lead to anything. Especially since gaim has never been in a position to accept money, which knocks out one of your methods, and I have no real idea what contributing 'time' means unless you mean answering bug reports and stuff like that. In which case the developers have that mostly in hand, with the occasional help of lurking users.
Whether you are or are not something is relevant when you are accusing others of being the same thing. "[Y]ou are X too" is not a defense as much as it is an indicator of the fact that your accusation holds much less weight.
Oh and while part of your message certainly could have been intended as merely a restating of a stated developer position. The parts that speak about 'cold, ink hearts' and the parts suggesting that we would horribly fail at a donation drive are not. Plenty of people have restated our position before without incident, the 'attacks' in your post were the problem, the same way the attacking nature of the original post was my issue and not the idea.
my post was as logically valid as both of yours, which is to say really not valid at all: The fact that I'm here because I need something does not prove that I am selfish.
Where did that quote come from? I don't recall seeing that myself. As to the truth of that statement, a random user who contributes nothing to the development of gaim and complains about bugs or slowness, by *definition* does provide nothing but grief, so whether that was a statement of fact or a pejorative is an important distinction.
And there is a difference between working on gaim because we want to and being selfish, if we were really selfish you wouldn't have it at all and I wouldn't bother spending my time talking to you. Since neither of those is true that should tell you something.
Without running our own donation drive I can't really assert this, but I will state that I fully believe that if gaim held such an event we would quite likely do as well if not better than amarok did. But since it is unlikely gaim is going to hold such an event it is hard to make that claim with anything other than just my belief behind it. (Also, and this is just for the record, any donation drive with a prize will likely do a good bit of business simply because of the prize, which is to say nothing about the reason most people donated but just a belief of mine in the way people work.)
Last thing, if, at any point anyone can point out anything concrete and specific that the gaim developers do that is mean-spirited, directly anti-user, or any other such 'evil' I would dearly like it pointed out. I very much doubt you will find any.
libgaim will (finally) formally exist with the release of beta4, which will also come with 2 UIs, gaim (gtk) and gaim-text (ncurses). it has taken a massive amount of work to make this possible, almost none of which has been user-visible. That's why no other project has offered two UIs since the last time licq tried it.
Slight correction: we've had 8 years of beta versions
haha, nice sean.
I've been lurking around here and using gaim for 4 of those years, I've never been anything other than happy with the outcome! I may get impatient, but that's because I know it can only get better. It can't be easy to do all of the things you developers do. Why any of you would do anything other than shrug off statements of selfishness is beyond me, if you were doing this for yourselves what would be the logic in releasing it publicly?
If my hard drive craps out, millions of people have a copy of the code for me.
If you want to work on better integration with GNOME, I'm all for that. I'm a Gaim developer and I spend quite a bit of time reviewing patches. However, I think it's unfair for you to say that "X is never going to happen because ..." when you haven't tried "X".
Submit some patches to do GNOME-integration things, and we'll see how that fits into the overall Gaim goals. For example, we don't want to sacrifice usability for people of other desktop environments, or people who don't use a desktop environment, to make Gaim more integrated with GNOME.
If your patches are rejected, I'd say then you could consider forking. It seems premature to talk about forking before you have any code.
For the record, many users of Gaim are a drain. They submit bug reports for things covered in teh FAQ. They submit duplicate bug reports. They ask for stupid features. This all contributes to developer animosity towards users and burn-out. However, the frustration that I've seen is generally limited to people who are being a drain, not people with real bugs, people with legitimate questions, people who want to help, etc.
We *do* code Gaim largely for ourselves. It's an open source project, so our incentive is to work on things we're interested in. However, many of us (definitely myself included) spend a LOT of time reading and responding to bug reports, reviewing patches, etc.
Regarding releases... What difference does it make if the release is a beta or a "final" release. I've been using the "beta" code for a long time, and it's mostly bug free. If it has bugs that annoy you, jump in and help fix them. Finally, keep in mind that the changes we've been introducing with 2.0.0 aren't all user-visible... Many things under the hood have been improved, which will help the project in the future.
rlaager is exactly on target in pinpointing the types of users who have raised my fustration level so very high.
He's also exactly right in describing our policy for gnomish patches.
He's ALSO exactly right in looking at our releases. Sean would tell you that EVERY gaim release is a "beta" release. 90% of them have just been snapshots of cvs or subversion.
Gaim's policies are quite "hat in the bag", if I may say so.
"hat in the bag"? What is that supposed to mean?
I think you know what I'm getting at ;-)
Nope, I've never heard that expression before.
nor have I.
I can only point you to pertinent examples:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1596598&forum_id=665
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1593916&forum_id=665
Just my 2 cents
I don't usually support forking projects, but I'd whole-heartedly support a fork of gaim. To speak of beta code that is "mainly bug free" is a joke. Every beta of gaim 2.0 has created new bugs for me, and I don't consider any of them stable. 99% of them come as a side effect of new features. You've been beta for a year and you still haven't hit feature freeze?
1.5 is very stable, but it's just way too old. Since no respectable linux distro will package beta versions, most linux users will be stuck with 1.5 until hell freezes over and 2.0 is released officially.
I have never seen any open source project with such animosity towards users. ALL open-source projects live mainly on the efforts of volunteers, but in 99% of the cases they don't moan and complain about how much hard work they put in and how nobody appreciates it. I appreciate that I can IM with free software. Thank you for that. But, I don't appreciate the way you treat your users, and it's completely turned me off from contributing to the project in any way.
most other projects have rather more limited contact with their users. Many projects do not even have a public irc channel where developers can be reliably found. I think this more limited contact is useful in maintaining goodwill amoung developers for their users.
I have been regularly insulted and abused for nearly every decision I have participated in and a good many I had no control over since the day I joined the gaim project. I have watched many developers go from feeling quite positively about our user base to hatred of them, a defensive reaction to the heaps of abuse we regularly get. I have even seen developers walk away and leave the project, because the abuse we get makes working on gaim cease to be fun.
I have had email addresses and IM contact info posted in the form of a personal ad on online-sex message boards as "retribution" for denying a feature request (the user in question boasted of the fact in an email to me).
I have had users attempt to threaten me with ceasing to use gaim if I do xyz, and other users threaten to cease using gaim if I do _not_ implement xyz.
It should be no wonder that we grow a dislike of users. As I type this list, inevitably recalling to mind hundreds of unpleasent experiences brought on by my continued participation in gaim, I rather wonder that we have been able to keep _any_ developers, that _all_ of us have not given up on the project.
Actually, beta4 has fixed the issues of interoperability with gimp and GTK+ under windows (At least for me under XP). I have not found any other problems and it SEEMS to be quite stable. Granted, I have not loosed my teenagers on it yet...
It would really be nice to put an end to the pissing match that seems to be never ending between some of the folks on this forum and some of the developers.
My only complaints in the past have been about the length of time it was taking to fix the GTK+ issues and the somewhat dismissive attitude from some of the developers towards some of the more vocal forum participants.
One issue seems to be fixed. I think Sean made a huge gesture towards fixing the other by implementing the PlanetGAIM site. Now if someone besides Sean would post an occaisional update there instead of getting drawn into the bickering about who supports who on the forums, all would be well on the way to being at least civil again.
Thanks for the GTK+ fixes. You guys rock again!
Regards,
Bob