[gkdr]

the omemo support in pidgin is just through a plugin, as with many recent XEPs. i think people tend to forget that pidgin's focus is being a multi-protocol messenger. it ships with XMPP support, but that mostly includes the base.

i wrote that omemo plugin and tbh I am pretty burned out. so many moving parts, it's hell to debug and i'm not even sure where to go next with it. (plus people keep talking badly about pidgin anyway and i am not sure if it's even worth continuing.) i am very thankful for all the contributions so far, especially the help with packaging it. sorry if someone feels let down.

i feel like this is the right moment to ask: if anyone reading has an idea how to improve the state of things, i'd be happy about some suggestions. the project page is https://github.com/gkdr/lurch

[southerntofu]

> i think people tend to forget that pidgin's focus is being a multi-protocol messenger.

That's what's great about it and part of the reasons i think blocking Pidgin would be very wrong.

> i wrote that omemo plugin and tbh I am pretty burned out.

Thanks for that work! Maybe you could start by writing about your burnout on the README to encourage other people to contribute/maintain, or at least be less demanding of you?

> it's hell to debug and i'm not even sure where to go next with it.

Do you think this is specific to your plugin? To OMEMO? Or to pidgin plugins in general? Personally, i find it very challenging to write correct code in C, and i can only imagine the pains pidgin developers have to come through to make so many networks/protocols inteoperate. If you have some reading about your experiences, what lessons we can learn, and maybe some project (whether internal to pidgin or not) to implement them, i'd be interested to read.

> sorry if someone feels let down.

I don't think anyone feels really let down. Some people are not aware of just how experimental certain things are and so they get disappointed but life goes on. You however should take care of your mental health and not let maintenance burden and heartless cyber-ranters like me affect your mood and taste for computing <3

[gkdr]

>Thanks for that work! Maybe you could start by writing about your burnout on the README to encourage other people to contribute/maintain, or at least be less demanding of you?

you're welcome! :D that sounds like a good idea, at least so people know i am not planning to abandon it even if i'm slow. i don't think people are demanding, i just feel bad that despite my best efforts it just doesn't work for some.

>Do you think this is specific to your plugin? To OMEMO? Or to pidgin plugins in general? Personally, i find it very challenging to write correct code in C, and i can only imagine the pains pidgin developers have to come through to make so many networks/protocols inteoperate.

in fact it's mostly related to your last point. there's just so many moving parts to this decentralized system: the os, installed libaries, exact version of the plugin, exact version of pidgin (or rather the underlying libpurple), the version of the used xmpp server, the version of the module implementing the XEP on the server, the version of the client on the other end, and how exactly that client implemented OMEMO and other XEPs in combination (e.g. the order of elements or their attributes in the received or sent xml).

right now there is a persistent bug that some omemo xml element cannot be parsed, and based on the input taken from the debug log i cannot reproduce it in unit tests, and i don't even know where to begin, and why it doesn't seem to affect other clients. also, persistent discovery issues that from my end don't look like a problem, and yet this plugin is the only one having these problems. i believe other clients must spam those discovery messages just in case, i didn't verify that yet though :)

>If you have some reading about your experiences, what lessons we can learn, and maybe some project (whether internal to pidgin or not) to implement them, i'd be interested to read.

i don't, but maybe i should write it down! venting in this reply already helped a lot, thank you :D

>I don't think anyone feels really let down. Some people are not aware of just how experimental certain things are and so they get disappointed but life goes on. You however should take care of your mental health and not let maintenance burden and heartless cyber-ranters like me affect your mood and taste for computing <3 aww, thank you! well, it's not like i don't get it, what i do can barely be called maintenance and libpurple's XMPP implementation isn't exactly modular, so you need to install 5+ plugins to get a "modern" messaging experience alone. i don't think i let some ranting get to me, don't worry about that! what i do feel bad for, aside from the people who are disappointed that it doesn't work, are the people who have actually contributed already, or were trying to contribute but i didn't look at the PRs in time and now the codebase just moved along too far.

i got some helpful lessons out of it either way, so i definitely don't regret it. a big part of it is what i already tried to say in my last post: i'm mostly not sure where to go with that project.

[nitia]

Having built upon your work and used it as a reference myself, I appreciate the effort dude :)

[gkdr]

i'm glad to hear it was helpful to you! what kind of project did you make?