
Gaim, Pidgin: Change the name but the dunghill is still the same.
It was Peter Lawler (bleeter) on 26 September 2005 who announced:
“Just a brief note, gaim-vv is completely dead now. Now work will be taking place on our cvs tree. We’re close to making the merge with gaim’s 2.x development tree. ”
Damn, how much were you close? It’s more than two years now and gaim/pidgin still doesn’t have a/v support…how’s that possible?
So, maybe they could be so far from the real working thing with gaim-vv and that’s a good reason why the project was dropped but I point you that still Peter Lawler some months earlier writes:
“I’ve been a minor hacker on the main gaim program for sometime, and as such have kept quite a number of developmental versions on my system here. Now as the gaim-vv fella, I’ve had to bite the bullet and make a couple of decisions.
First of which is updating the core gaim. As there are quite a number of ‘enhancements’ which the current development branch of gaim offers, I’ve version bumped my own working gaim-vv copy here to gaim’s HEAD branch. This does not mean there may not be another gaim-vv-1.x release, just that the work being done, if sufficiently complete at any stage, will be backported to whichever gaim-1.x release is out at that given point in time. This move is largely complete on my own working copies here.”
LATEST NEWS:
Oct 07, 2005 - Forward potr of gaim-vv 1.2.0 to gaim cvs head is working. I would like to clarify that gaim-vv isn’t completely dead, we’re working on merging with gaim. There will be no further gaim-vv releases, as code will be added to the main gaim program.
Sep 21, 2005 - Delayed announcement that gaim-vv is dead. All is not lost, though, as we’re in the process of forward porting to gaim 2.x. Yes! This means we’re aiming to include -vv abilities to the next major release of gaim! Subsequently, gaim-vv is no longer directly supported, and only lib2k and gstj2k will be supported.
Of course as you can state, this never happens but on the other side other interesting things happen…
It was 13 October 2005 when Google announced that Sean Egan has been hired by the company. Sean is the main developer of Gaim, the most popular IM client. According to Sean, he’s to work “on making it as easy as possible for other clients to use Google Talk’s voice features”, so we can expect Gaim and other clients to be interoperable with Google Talk’s voice features in the near future.
All boiled water…nothing of all that.
But as they are speaking in 2005 about Egan’s hiring it seems that the Open Source Community should only gain by this. False. False. False.
It seems to me that the main improvement (which looks a downgrade to me) from Gaim to Pidgin is the change of the name. A lot of Pidgin users are still talking about a/v support on the mailing list but contrary to what 2005 information let us to believe now, developer’s replies are kinda rude.
But I’ll be more rude, no problem with that.
Let’s see:
From Ticket #34 Pidgin:
# Voice/Video support opened in December 2006
Reported by: MarkDoliner
Assigned: seanegan (accepted?)
Priority: minor
Component: libpurple
Description: still no reason to require this to be a 3.0.0 feature; this can happen (as miracles happens) in a 2.x.0 release.
Let’s read some hilarious comments…
09/03/2007 03:15:23 PM changed by seanegan
09/03/2007 09:52:42 PM changed by seanegan
09/04/2007 06:40:10 PM changed by bleeter (… our dear Peter)
‘the old man said’:
money can buy almost all, also the cheapest souls.
Mr. Egan, you suck.