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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?
Insert metaphor regarding painting a barn here.
Am I the only person who judges programs by their available options, not just feature set?
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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.
want to know something silly. Adium is based off of the same libraries as pidign. Just a different set of devs. In fact there are so many ways to customize adium it is scary.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Tcha. Then make it a compile time option and let the people who feel that strongly about the issue enable or disable it at build time. The can stick the instructions in the FAQ.
I really can't see the point of refusing to budge over such a trivial issue.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
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.
There are some applications and configuration options where this isn't true - for example, a text editor for programmers would be less useful if you couldn't configure how many spaces are in a tab - but for simple end-user facing applications like Pidgin and the mechanism for resizing the text input box making a choice arbitrarily (or optimizing for UI simplicity) among the usable possibilities is probably the correct design decision.
There is always going to be a vocal minority who really wants to be able to configure every last little thing about their software. For free software, they can simply be pointed to the source code and told to have fun. As a usability compromise, features like Mozilla's "about:config" are good - as long as the user is told that weird configurations won't be supported. 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.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
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.
And sometimes things have to be options. Look, clearly there's a class of users that finds the resizing feature to be useful -- which is why it was requested and added. At a guess, it's really nice on platforms with really small screens -- displaying a single line of input field lets you see as much conversation as possible, most of the time. So that's nifty.
However there's also a class of users that finds the whole thing stupid and annoying and inconsistent. For one, UI elements aren't expected to change their shape without an explicit request, and for the whole screen to jump while you're typing is pretty jarring. For another, thanks to the "options are evil" thing, there's no way to configure the minimum or maximum size of the input area, which leads to a UI that's just generally ugly when the app is used in a different way from how the developers are expecting. That's not friendly either.
So this is a case where configurability really would be simple, and worthwhile, and make everybody happy. But the pidgin developers have instead chosen to say "fuck you". And not for the first time either. They aren't the least bit interested in communicating with their users, and they haven't really been for years. In a sense, that's their right -- but it doesn't mean the users are required to put up with it. They say that they work on pidgin as a hobby activity, for their own satisfaction -- well let's see how much satisfaction they get from "owning" a project with no users.
Hopefully they'll use git so they can merge when they make up.
I can attest that they birds are really that dumb. The same goes for Seagulls.
I work nearby where the bus-garage is located, and there is an absolutely huge amount of seagulls that flock to the parking lot because it is shiny smooth blacktop and they apparently are so stupid that they think it is water...
Anyway, they used to employ someone to scatter the birds so that the buses could leave and enter without the seagulls being crushed. The poor guy had to come out in a bee-keeper suit, because the little bastards would fly into his face--not to mention he was shat on quite a lot.
But then they found out that local laws preventing the killing of native birds do not explicitly apply to seagulls (or any maritime bird other than Pelicans, strangely) and they just started crushing them left and right when they buses needed to leave.
That's right: They just roll over them and create a path 'o death between the bus-barn and the exit gate. Then someone comes by with a bobcat and scrapes them up and dumps them into a dumpster. Then washes off the blood and guts with a pressure washer.
I was utterly shocked--SHOCKED!--when this first started happening. But after a few months, and the size of the flock never dwindled... It's almost scary. Where are they coming from? At least 100 or so are killed every day... they can't be laying eggs that quickly. can they?
Oh well. The local hippies are taking care of it now. They come in early and shoo the birds out of the way of the buses, so that there is minimal seagull carnage.
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.
That's an issue with maintainability though, not usability. The program can be just as usable with a compile time option in there. More so, since it doesn't annoy all those people who find the feature doesn't suit their work patterns.
And really, there's no reason it has to even be a maintenance issue with proper software design. The IM code is already isolated in libpurple, They could (if they wished) have a separate interface with no more side-effect issues than there are already between finch and pidgin. It would require that someone to commit to maintain the option, but then, given that there seem to be enough devs to support a fork, that probably wouldn't have been a problem.
Me neither, I must admit, and for the same reason. Still, I have to say that over the past five years I've gone from being an argent fan of Gaim to using Kopete and Amsn almost exclusively. So I'm not entirely surprised that their userbase is up in arms.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
- Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Opera
- Windows Live Messenger, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, or Skype
- Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, or Eudora
- Windows Media Player, Quicktime Player, or RealPlayer
Man, no wonder Windows has such a tiny market share, with all that consumer-unfriendly choice!in fact, why don't I post some of it:
Seriously though. Pidgin and its predecessor Gaim are forked every 6 months or so. It's what happens when developers enforce their petty "HIG guidelines" over common sense. Someone please tell me why it is necessary to forbid the user from resizing a window or widget that was previously resizeable. The preferences window is another one. There's no reason at all that they had to set it as nonresizeable, and occasionally it pisses me off enough to port my patch (which comments one line of code) to the latest version so that I can resize it again. It breaks nothing by doing it.
It's things like this (Nautilus shot) that really should never ever ever be done in the name of "usability".