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?

Comments

Pigeons

[stoolpigeon]

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]

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

Re:Pigeons

[SCHecklerX]

When in Baltimore one day, I saw a pigeon casually walk back and forth in front of the tire that was slowly approaching it as a guy parked his car. Bird went under feet first. The car was going so slow that the bird didn't get squished. Rather, it (probably quite agonizingly) exploded as the car pressurized its body. *pop*. One of the most disturbing things I've ever witnessed.

Re:Pigeons

[khraz]

And you got modded funny for it. Congratulations.

That's because there's no +1 Awesome.

Re:Pigeons

[Kent Recal]

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?"

Re:Pigeons

[kyz]

How do you account for this animated gif of a seagull sneaking into a shop and stealing a bag of crisps? If it was a smart gull, it would have worn a baseball cap or a hoodie, so it wasn't recognisable to the police on the CCTV.

The debate is now over...

[Bazman]

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

Re:All Too Often

[hercubus]

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...

Re:Good God

[thePsychologist]

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:GET OFF MY LAUN!

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two "U"s in lawn.

Re:More options are always better!

[spun]

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.

Re:GET OFF MY LAUN!

[SatanicPuppy]

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:Is there a technical reason not to allow both w

[Spetiam]

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.

Stupid Users!

[qazwart]

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:GET OFF MY LAUN!

[pjt33]

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

Funpidgin motto

[Anonymous Coward]

"The user should have the final say" I can hear this ending with a monkey killing 15 with a shotgun.

Re:GET OFF MY LAUN!

[PitaBred]

That's interesting! I think I shall call your invention a "double-u".

Anyone using such a construct in the future without my permission shall be sued. I named it, I own it.

Now we just need to fork Gnome...

[argent]

Or have they stopped removing features and options that are actually necessary yet?

Re:More options are always better!

[spun]

And this is yet another reason why Open Source has a trouble taking hold in the mainstream. It's crap like this that confuses the average joe who just wants a working piece of software. Now there are even more options, with even less differences. Are you saying you don't want to play with my balls?

Re:How to unfork:

[Jesus_666]

Ths is clearly an either/or decision, so we should use radio buttons:

(_) Allow resizing of chat input area
(_) Automaticaly control chat input window size
(_) Neither
(X) Both

Re:How to unfork:

[RiotingPacifist]

Actually they are arguing about the name so it should be

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