Late Wednesday night gaim-0.82 was released which resolves various security and crashing issues. It was a very good release, but unfortunately upstream discovered a nasty crash that would lead to 3 weeks of annoying duplicate reports and complaints. In an admittedly unwise move 18 hours later they replaced the gaim-0.82 tarball silently fixing that one issue. But I think they said it wasn't entirely fixed correctly.
This of course can lead to all kinds of confusion for us distributors, as Fedora and other Linux distributions had already issued updates with the original 0.82. So we requested a 0.82.1 release which happened late Thursday.
Rawhide now has 0.82.1-1 which should work very well. gaim-0.82-0.FCX released in updates has only one crash in the corner case of the user having open windows with buddy icons while they change the button display preferences. Most users will probably never run into this problem. In any case, I do not consider this issue to be reason enough to issue the already too frequent gaim updates.
In the future I am hoping to help gaim upstream establish a better formalized testing procedure, perhaps with release candidates with automated distribution of binaries to an army of eager testers. It will take something like this in order to avoid many regressions that are always discovered after each gaim release.
We the Fedora community are well equiped to provide valuable feedback. I will probably be announcing a more rapidly changing gaim side-repository along with testing/reporting methodology documents later in the next upstream gaim development cycle.
I am also especially interested in hearing any suggestions from Fedora developers about ways to further integrate gaim into other desktop components, to provide a more smooth & cohesive desktop experience.
One example that needs help is in gaim + evolution integration. Currently the plugin is included in rawhide gaim, but disabled by default since it has been unstable in my limited testing. Volunteer help is needed there to try it, and communicate with both gaim & evolution upstream to figure out how it can be fixed/improved.
Ok... might be able to actually sleep now...
Warren Togami wtogami@xxxxxxxxxx
