Case Study 5 - gaim/Pidgin

For all the bugs Pidgin is/gaim was supposed to have, I imagine that most of it can be put down to bugs in GTK+ in Windows. Below are some bugs that are definitely the fault of Pidgin/gaim and its plugins.

Part of the Open Source case study.

gaim

I really do like the Accounts Status plugin, I do, but it is fatally buggy and I am no C programmer. If you set it to show status in a window, each time you get disconnected and reconnected it starts a new one.

(If you get disconnected while Accounts State is shown in the Buddy List window, gaim dies.)

The next two errors show gaim having a bit of speech trouble:

So, really, if flippin’ Windows GTK+ worked, gaim would be just fine!

Well, maybe…

Pidgin

Like Firefox, gaim has come a long way over the years, especially with the transition to Pidgin. One bug that may never get fixed, is the offline status icon which, under Windows 2000, will not render:

The icon file is fine; the code to display it is somehow broken, failing to take into account Windows 2000’s inability to handle alpha channels in icons.