Pidgin Controversy Triggers Fork

paleshadows writes "Pidgin, the premier multi-protocol instant messaging client, has been forked. This is the result of a heated, emotional, and very interesting debate over a controversial new feature: As of version 2.4, the ability to manually resize the text input area has been removed; instead, it automatically resizes depending on how much is typed. It turns out that this feature, along with the uncompromising unwillingness of the developers to provide an option to turn it off, annoys the bejesus of very many users. One comment made by a Professor that teaches "Collaboration in an Open Source World" argued that 'It's easy to see why open source developers could develop dogmas. [...] The most dangerous dogma is the one exhibited here: the God feature. "One technological solution can meet every possible user-desired variation of a feature." [...] You [the developers] are ignoring the fan base with a dedication to your convictions that is alarmingly evident to even the most unobservant of followers, and as such, you are demonstrating that you no longer deserve to be in the position of servicing the needs of your user base.'" Does anyone besides me find this utterly ridiculous?

Pigeons

[stoolpigeon (454276)]

Just can't get our act together. It's why we've never been able to get past our image as disorganized and in general lower than the other birds.

Re:Pigeons

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo (1000167)]

Mmmm, forked Pidgin, reminds me of my last Thanksgiving dinner.

Re:This is why people prefer commercial software

[bluefoxlucid (723572)]

Microsoft releases whatever they damn well please and everyone has to upgrade or else they can't open docx files from work.

Re:Pigeons

[Kent Recal (714863)]

It was just interesting to see exactly how stupid these creatures are: They would AAWWWRRRK! at the oncoming bus which must have been going 2MPH before the rather loud SQUELCH of the bird being smooshed under the tires.

As one of my relatives is^Wwas a seagull I can explain this behaviour.
It's actually fairly simple: When seagulls rest they normally float on the water.
They don't have to be scared of "big boxy things" approaching because normally that
would be a ship and that would just gently push them out of the way - not even disturbing
their sleep.

Therefore seagulls have never had a need to develop defensive strategies
against human land vehicles - or anything else that's walking on wheels.

To make matters worse the brain of a seagull is really small
and their mental abilities are somehwat limited, akin to a 0.5MHZ CPU.

Thus, you are probably right that their small mind falsely classifies the blacktop as "water" at first.
"Big boxy thing approaching at 2MPH" is not so slow anymore when your single thread of execution
is blocked with sorting out the unfamilar sensory input: "Why is this water so hard?"

GET OFF MY LAUN!

[Bananatree3 (872975)]

This whole situation reeks of some crusty developer stuck in his ways.

Re:GET OFF MY LAUN!

[by Anonymous Coward]

There are two "U"s in lawn.

Re:GET OFF MY LAUN!

[pjt33 (739471)]

Of course we do. You USians (at a guess) may have forked it, but ours is the original and our decisions are unquestionable.

Re:GET OFF MY LAUN!

[SatanicPuppy (611928)]

The fact that its a crappy feature makes me think it must have originated with a developer.

Developers and User Interfaces don't tend to get along well; you need to go out on the street and grab a couple of people wearing matching outfits and get them to draw your UI on a napkin or something.

Re:GET OFF MY LAUN!

[jd142 (129673)]

But if the software isn't written for the users, what is it written for? If it is just written purely for the author's use, then don't bother creating a community. By creating a community with feedback and interaction with the user base, the project is no longer "write a gaim replacement" it has morphed into "create a piece of software for my community." If you don't care about what the users think, don't release the software and build up pidgin.im with its forums and a promise of support and development.

Is there a technical reason not to allow both ways

[Paradigm_Complex (968558)]

If there's no technical reason not to allow both options with a simple option in a menu somewhere, then yes it is ridiculous. If there is some downside to allowing users to resize the text input area then a fork is exactly what is needed. Open source is awesome.

Re:Is there a technical reason not to allow both w

[_Swank (118097)]

While I completely agree with your premise - that usability is often the opposite of allowing configurable options for everything - I think that the way they made the dialog behave is not the right way. I have never seen another application do what pidgin now does. In general, that doesn't necessarily make it the wrong thing to do but in this case I think it does.

Re:Is there a technical reason not to allow both w

[Spetiam (671180)]

I have never seen another application do what pidgin now does.

I have. Google Talk.

And I hate it. It drives me nuts, actually. I hate it so much I stopped using the "official" Google Talk client and switched to Pidgin.

Joke's on me.

Re:Is there a technical reason not to allow both w

[QCompson (675963)]

I think the main reason to not make it an option is because it is such a tiny obscure detail that you wouldn't even think to look for an option in the first place. And thus adding the option to the GUI would be useless clutter.

Which is why Pidgin offers the use of plugins. Yet the developers refuse to add a "resize input area" plugin to the list of default plugins (despite the demand) for fear of cluttering up the plugin area.

Re:Is there a technical reason not to allow both w

[FatMacDaddy (878246)]

I agree that simplicity is almost always better, but I would say that good usability is always about listening to user feedback. Basically this change flunked the usability test for a lot of folks and the developers should find a way to elegantly implement that option. There's undoubtedly a way to add this ability without adding "useless clutter." And I would say this clutter wouldn't be useless since people are asking for it.

Re:Is there a technical reason not to allow both w

[Sancho (17056)]

Honestly, the best way to deal with it would be to auto-resize unless the user explicitly changes the size. From that point on, give them control of the window.

But if you look at the images in the linked page, there definitely appear to be some usability concerns here.

Re:Implement it as a plugin!

[QCompson (675963)]

There is a plugin available that does just that, but the Pidgin developers don't want to include it as a default plugin. Partly because they don't want to clutter the plugin list, and party because they wish to force users to get used to their auto-resize input area.

More options are always better!

[Reality Master 201 (578873)]

More options are always better, right?

I mean, sure, forking a project means that we now have fewer developers concentrating on a product than before, but it's for the best because now we'll have two IM clients that are nearly identical except for some minor things. All because some programmers are egotistical assholes!

The Open Source world needs to grow the fuck up. More options aren't always better - more good options are better, more options for the sake of having more options or because you can't learn to play nicely with the other kids are stupid.

Re:More options are always better!

[Rob T Firefly (844560)]

I'd take this fork as an extreme example of the Open Source world "growing the fuck up," as you put it. The original developers choose not to fulfill a need of their user base, so a new crowd with the wherewithal to do it decides to work on achieving that rather than exchanging flames with the old guard.

If the kid with the ball doesn't want to play fair, you either cry about it, or get your own ball and play like reasonable people. These folks did the latter.

Re:More options are always better!

[spun (1352)]

If the kid with the ball doesn't want to play fair, you either cry about it, or get your own ball and play like reasonable people. These folks did the latter.

Thankfully, open source has lots of balls, and you can always clone someone else's balls and use them if you don't like the way that someone is playing with their balls.

That's why Open-Source fails on the desktop

[by Anonymous Coward]

I know some will probably tag this as a troll or a flamebait, however IMHO this is exactly why Linux will never be able to really replace either Windows or Mac OS X for desktop usage.

Too many people who think they know better than the end-users, and too much work being done by lots of people on different, competing projects. You need to unite your efforts, not work against each others. This fork is just another proof (and WTH is with that "premier multi-protocol instant messaging client" remark? Nobody uses that on Windows and Mac OS X).

The whole KDE vs Gnome debate is one of the things that keeps Windows on PCs.

Posted as AC because of Linux and OSS zealots.

Re:That's why Open-Source fails on the desktop

[sqlrob (173498)]

All the Windows clients here use Pidgin for their IM, and it's one of the clients recommended by IT for the internal IM server.

Re:That's why Open-Source fails on the desktop

[spikenerd (642677)]

How is this any different than what Apple does? I want my pull-down menus at the top of my windows, but they are so confident that being able to bump your mouse against the top of the screen is a better UI design that they absolutely refuse to give me the option. I want a second mouse button, but they know that the second button leads to UI confusion, so they will not give me an option to turn on support for another button. I want to run on hardware that I built myself, but they know I'm better off running on their hardware so they won't let me. Apple has the same complex in spades, so don't diss on the Linux community by trying to compare with Apple.

Re:That's why Open-Source fails on the desktop

[grumbel (592662)]

Simple example of two options:

[ ] Focus follows mouse
[ ] MacOS style menus

Great, each of those might be something that is wanted by the user. However if you switch them both on you end up with an unusable application, since the moment you move your mouse into the direction of the menu you lose focus. You simply can't combine both.

Now as long as both of these options are in a single application, you might be able to catch that, but what if they are in different application? One application choses 'Mac menus' by default and your window manager uses focus follows mouse by default. The user will have good fun trying to figure out why the menu always disappears when he tries to reach it.

Now this is just an example, but options can always have unintended side effects. And just because option X works and option Y work, that doesn't mean that X and Y work together. Which is the reason why one should try to keep options to a minimum, so that the behavior of the application stays predictable.

That all is of course doesn't mean that all options should be removed, some are important, but one really need to be careful about which to keep and just keeping everything will just lead to a mess.

All Too Often

[eldavojohn (898314)]

All too often on software projects, I see someone spend several days figuring out a neat thing to implement that they personally think is a great addition.

And when it comes time to remove it they defend it. They may even realize that they were wrong thinking everyone would love it. But they just don't want to give up that code that cost them so much time to figure out and write.

Coding for several days only to realize that you need to throw everything you wrote away is one of the hardest skills for a developer to learn ...

Murdering your darlings

[athloi (1075845)]

A writing professor once called this "murdering your darlings," in the context of writing fiction.

You develop a scene with blood, sweat and tears, and then realize it's baggage and there's a better way, and shorter/more compact is always better.

It hurts but it beats the alternative, which is reduced quality of writing.

Re:All Too Often

[hercubus (755805)]

How about asking actual users before starting to code anything? Or at the very least, fellow programmers who work on the same project?

when i want an actual user's opinion, i'll beat it out of him

come on, every developer's thunk it at least once...

How to unfork:

[wbren (682133)]

Add the following in Preferences window:

[X] Allow resizing of chat input area

Re:How to unfork:

[edraven (45764)]

Both options could be included

[X] Allow resizing of chat input area
[X] Automatically control chat input window size

Find *what* utterly ridiculous?

[bigskank (748551)]

"Does anyone besides me find this utterly ridiculous?"

Depends on what you mean. Do I find it ridiculous that developers are ignoring a sizable portion of their userbase and implementing a feature that many people would like to disable? Yes, I find it ridiculous. Not terribly surprising, but ridiculous nonetheless.

Do I find it ridiculous that it's causing a project to fork? Not particularly. This is supposed to be the one of the greatest advantages of open source; if you don't like the way people play, you can pick up the pieces and start your own game. Silly me, I had secretly hoped that the threat of something like this happening would keep software like pidgin from ignoring its user base. Guess I was wrong.

The debate is now over...

[Bazman (4849)]

...because their Trac is slashdotted. Problem solved.

Google cache link to pidgin bugzilla page

[Lendrick (314723)]

here [64.233.169.104]

This feature sounds Gnomish

[pembo13 (770295)]

Seems like something that would be done to a Gnome app. Hope that's just a coincidence. Back to Kopete I guess.

Another bad decision by the pidgin folk

[Improv (2467)]

This wouldn't be the first time the pidgeon folk have decided to change the interface and refused to let people keep things the way they liked. Forks have been threatened before over their decision to hide protocol icons as well. I'm glad they separated the gui from the rest of the program - both this and the protocol icon decision really bug me.

The fork page...

[JustinOpinion (1246824)]

For anyone interested, the fork is called "Funpidgin" and can be found here [sourceforge.net].

The summary makes light of it, but the Funpidgin page explains that their intention is to respond more directly to the requests of the user community. In addition to the feature mentioned in the summary, Funpidgin has implemented some others [sourceforge.net], and will presumably continue adding user-requested features (while still integrating upgrades from the pidgin codebase, presumably).

Forks are both good and bad; this one is no exception. On the one hand it "wastes effort" and can duplicate work. On the other hand, it can give the user community (which isn't homogeneous) the product(s) they want. It can encourage useful competition. Often the end result will be better than if no fork had occurred. Another example is the Compiz/Beryl fork, which created some duplication for awhile, but ultimately turned out for the best since the merged Compiz Fusion includes the best features from both (a stable core and all the whiz-bang features users wanted, in the form of plugins).

If both the Pidgin and Funpidgin developers work to provide something that their respective users find worthwhile, then what's the problem?

Considering my general hatred of the Pidgin UI

[_xeno_ (155264)]

Considering my general hatred of the Pidgin UI, no, I don't find this ridiculous.

Let's start with Pidgin's UI Sucks [xenoveritas.org], which details some of the weird UI decisions made back around version 2.1. Fortunately they've fixed almost all the issues listed in that post.

More Pidgin Bashing [xenoveritas.org] is just a bug, so let's skip ahead to Pidgin's Crappy Formatting Icons [xenoveritas.org] which they have not fixed.

If I ever had the time to, I'd like to write a new UI for libpurple, Pidgin's backend. I have some ideas - but not enough time to actually learn how to use libpurple.

Maybe I can help with this fork, called... uh. Hm. The summary doesn't appear to mention it.

Ah, here we go: funpidgin [sourceforge.net].

can't blame them

[pak9rabid (1011935)]

Ya know, I can't blame the community for this fork. The gaim/pidgin developers have had a bad history of 'God complex'. Hell, just recently they refused to make any changes to the way Pidgin handles SASL authentication to XMPP servers due to a change in the 2.4 codebase that completely breaks SSL encryption to the OpenFire XMPP server, whereas the 2.3 codebase AND every other XMPP client seems to not have any issues. Their response was something along the lines of "yeah, well we're doing it right..every other client is doing it wrong". I find that hard to believe. This ultimately leaves me with 2 options: either don't upgrade past version 2.3 of Pidgin, or use another client. And yes, not being able to resize the input text box drives me absolutely crazy. I look forward to a forked version addressing this and the XMPP SASL authentication issues.

Re:can't blame them

[shutdown -p now (807394)]

Can you please tell me why you hate not being able to resize the input box. I use iChat and I love the fact that is expands as I need it.

I'm not GP, but I can tell for myself. Personally, I like my GUI layout to remain static unless I explicitly change it (e.g. by dragging splitters around). Auto-resizing input field breaks this model.

Clearly, this is a matter of personal preference, nothing more. Luckily for me, Psi has an option to choose either behavior...

Ridiculous?

[edmicman (830206)]

Does anyone besides me find this utterly ridiculous?

No, not really. It's a feature that I personally don't think I'd care much about, but this sounds exactly like how the gaim/Pidgin developers are. My past experience has been that the people who develop gaim/Pidgin have always seemed to have a disdain for users other than themselves. They've been quick to dismiss any sort of criticism or suggestions for improvements to make the product better. Instead, they poopoo all of that behind the "we make this for ourselves and don't care if anyone else uses it" mantra.

Stupid Users!

[qazwart (261667)]

Always whining! "I want my software to do this!", "I want this feature!", "I don't like that design!".

If it wasn't for them, programming would be much easier.

Re:

[somersault (912633)]

MS would might have just made it an option.. doesn't sound like it would have been difficult to do. This issue has been brought on by the users anyway, MS users don't have the option to fork off a new codebase, they just have to take it up the ass with whatever MS does (I'm thinking of Office here mainly, where you just don't have many viable alternatives because of the attitude of the world that Office is the only thing you can use to write letters or make presentations and spreadsheets)

Re:Good God

[thePsychologist (1062886)]

I think we ought to formulate the Slashdot law, in a similar spirit to Godwin's law:

Slashdot Law: As a conversation on Slashdot grows longer, the probability of comparing someone to or bashing Microsoft approaches 1.

Re:Good God

[Lobster Quadrille (965591)]

rather:

No slashdot thread is complete without at least one (1) Microsoft bash.

Corollary: As it adds to the completeness of the thread, it will be modded informative.

Re:Good God

[Spy der Mann (805235)]

No slashdot thread is complete without at least one (1) Microsoft bash.

Alrighty then.

*ahem* Microsoft SUCK0RZ!!!1111ONE

There. Mission Accomplished! :)

Re:Good God

[by Anonymous Coward]

Just staying AC
But, yeah it's no joke... I gave up on being a test engineer for software after being let go (along with some others) at M.S. because I a would not pass a product with a clearly significant usability flaw. The development said it was by design and a feature. (Very similiar to the resizing functions mentioned above.)

I went and did the numbers and a full quality project, VOC data, etc. I presented my case at a later build. The developer, not having any actual evidence but his opinion, went into a flame war, trying to take me down. Effectively, I was insulting is 'intellegence' and want to 'undo months of work'. When that failed, he called me racist. He won, I got let go. I found out he was let go a couple months later over trying to defend the same 'feature' after a presentation with some higher ups, and insulted someone above him.

These flame wars happen all to much, I've found many programmers have 'control issues', perhaps that's what makes them good programmers; but lousy decision makers.

Re:Good God

[iamacat (583406)]

You are absolutely right if the project only ever has to support a single UI option. However, products that expect to be around for a few years accumulate dozens of such options. At this point, nobody has the bandwidth to test every possible configuration or fix bugs that only affect a few users who chose a particular combination. The code which is not used in default configuration is likely to not work properly with new core code, not be ported to additional platforms and plain look ugly with main UI which is skinned for a particular layout. Users who try the product on someone else's machine walk away with a negative impression as it has been customized to something that most people find unusable.

On the other hand, if you fix the UI, lots of users will complain initially. A majority of those will quickly adjust and stop noticing the difference. Some will walk away or fork the project. However, for those that stick around are much more likely to find that the UI functions properly in the manner intended than if the attention of developers was spread among thousands of possible configurations.

It's a basic choice for a project developer to do one thing well or provide many options where some or all do not work quite as well.

Re:Wow

[Skye16 (685048)]

Well, in all honesty I don't think it's over the text area so much as the fact that those in charge are adamant about allowing anyone to configure the client as they see fit. This is just a small symptom; the underlying cause is unbridled arrogance and muleheaded stubbornness.

Re:Pidgin guys are probably right.

[QCompson (675963)]

Options suck. Every option means doubling the number of possible configurations - which makes proper testing of the application twice as hard. It also provides twice as many weird ways that the developers can have their apps configured that will prevent them from noticing issues as they personally develop.

Fine, then with this much negative feedback about a supposed design "improvement", then perhaps the best answer is to scrap the idea and go back to letting the users resize the text input area. Problem solved.

But in this particular case the best solution really seems to be for the Pidgin guys to just tell the forkers to "have fun" and then proceed to ignore them because the feature they're offering is silly and pointless.

It is the auto-resizing text input area that most people feel is silly and pointless.

Re:I welcome the fork!!

[CronoCloud (590650)]

You should see my Freenode-#pidgin.log just after the removal of the protocol specific buddy icons fiasco last year This is just more of the same.

in fact, why don't I post some of it:

**** BEGIN LOGGING AT Sat May 5 02:17:42 2007

May 05 02:17:42 --> You are now talking on #pidgin
May 05 02:17:42 --- Topic for #pidgin is Welcome to the home of Pidgin, Finch, and libpurple, formerly Gaim || see: http://pidgin.im/ (yes, we know it's down, don't ask about it) for the announcement! || Before you seek support, be sure you're using 2.0.0 (NOT MTN) and READ THE FAQ: http://pidgin.im/faq.php || This is a PG channel || Windows questions should be asked in #pidgin-win32, even if you think it's not Windows-specific || MSN is a server issue || Pidgin is the fullcrap
May 05 02:17:42 --- Topic for #pidgin set by nosnilmot at Fri May 4 10:32:32 2007
May 05 02:17:43 -ChanServ- [#pidgin] Please read the FAQ at http://pidgin.im/faq.php and use Pidgin 2.0.0. If you want to use Pidgin with Google Talk, please read http://tinyurl.com/crze3
May 05 02:17:52 <mateuszk> deryni, Oh I didnt know about it...
May 05 02:18:53 <CronoCloud> I've been reading some of the tickets, particular the one about the protocol icons and I don't particularly like the condescending attitude the developers are showing to the users
May 05 02:19:15 <deryni> Then you need to reread it, and read the DesignGuidelines, and the mailing list, and the sf forums.
May 05 02:19:31 <CronoCloud> in other words: We know best.
May 05 02:19:32 <deryni> Because if you are taking offense at the developers attitude you aren't paying enough attention to the users insults.
May 05 02:19:37 <Orborde> How often is the API doxygen code regenerated.
May 05 02:19:40 <Orborde> ?
May 05 02:19:41 <deryni> Not a single developer has said that.
May 05 02:19:53 <Feles> Is it a GTK Bug that when you move a window on top of say, a Pidgin IM Window, that the window does not refresh correctly?
May 05 02:19:54 <CronoCloud> no but that's how it "comes across"
May 05 02:19:59 <deryni> The ones on the website? Not very often.
May 05 02:19:59 <Feles> (In Windows)
May 05 02:20:01 <deryni> CronoCloud: Not if you really read it.
May 05 02:20:03 <deryni> Feles: Topic.
May 05 02:20:14 <CronoCloud> I have read it, and that is exactly how it comes across
May 05 02:20:42 <deryni> CronoCloud: Then I'm sorry you have that opinion because that was never the point and I really fail to see how you can read it that way.
May 05 02:21:05 <Feles> >.> Sorry, they just weren't answering the question at all, thought I might have some luck here. Sorry about that.
May 05 02:21:07 <deryni> That is without also being outraged at the users for clearly not reading and spouting the same arguments repeatedly while insulting the developers.
May 05 02:21:15 <-- BHSPitMonkey (n=stephen@67.64.144.90) has left #pidgin ("Leaving")
May 05 02:21:23 <CronoCloud> sigh, look, respecting the users is a top priority, we complain when microsoft does it, and now you're doing the same thing
May 05 02:21:39 <deryni> Um, no it isn't. And yes, we are.
May 05 02:21:56 <deryni> We are actually respecting them more by trying to make things work better than by blithely giving in to their demands.
May 05 02:22:09 <CronoCloud> changing UI without user input is not good, after the change they're giving you input and you're ignoring it and saying we know best.
May 05 02:22:21 <-- barlas has quit (No route to host)
May 05 02:22:21 <deryni> We aren't ignoring it.
May 05 02:22:25 <deryni> They are ignoring us.
May 05 02:22:30 --> spanella47 (n=spanella@200.50.72.156) has joined #pidgin
May 05 02:22:31 <deryni> We have repeatedly explained our reasoning.
May 05 02:22:32 <deryni> They have not.
May 05 02:22:35 <CronoC

Re:i for one...

[MenTaLguY (5483)]

Well, no, it's actually a little widget that you interact with via the mouse. I don't know what else it could legitimately be called.

Re:i for one...

[MenTaLguY (5483)]

I can only assume you don't do much graphical UI development. "Widget" is a standard technical term used to refer to an element of a GUI. See for instance GUI Widget [wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia.

The Safari text boxes are compound widgets (or metawidgets [wikipedia.org], if you like), which include a "resize handle" widget in their corner.