Adium hates Yahoo
Well, at least beta5 does. So there's some major badness in the new AdiumX 0.7 beta5 that was released last night if you're a Yahoo user. And by badness I mean crash fest. You may not have noticed any issues if you aren't a Yahoo user, as it fixes a ton of buggage everywhere else.
But if you happen to be having problems, it's already fixed but rather than wait for beta6 (since I did turn some of you onto it I feel a little responsible) here's a special build that will take care of it (10.3 users only) given to me by Evan that takes care of it, along with a few other minor things.
It's fair to say this is one hell of a bug, and is due to a problem with away messages in Yahoo. I.E., the minute users set an away message things go crashy. If you log in and users are already set to away, it looks as though it crashes on loading your list. For whatever reason the Yahoo protocol isn't very popular amongst developers at all, although I haven't sat down and gotten the exact reasons why yet. I know in terms of protocols themselves the MSN protocol is somewhat hated due to how windows-centric it is, but for any reason most of these guys gravitate towards AIM.
Speaking of, there's another nice little present in this build just for me as it was something I requested while trying to track down another bug: finer granularity for sorting in the log viewer. There's an intermittent yahoo bug that has apparently been within Adium for awhile, but most will never see it... I just happen to see it often.
The problem is that someone from Yahoo will message you, but and Adium receives the message and even logs it, but you never get the chat window. Your dock icon will spin, etc. so the only real way to figure out who has just messaged you, because it's logged, is to open up your log viewer and look. There might be other ways, but I've turned off some of the events for the buddy list. :p
The problem was that the log viewer, for sorting by date, had a granularity by the day. If it happened at 12:30am this wasn't a big deal, but was a bigger deal if it happened at 11:30am as you had to scroll through to the ends of the logs of everyone who had messaged you that day to find who had said something new... not an issue anymore. That's service, and thanks.
The bug in question is a weird bug; I actually spent an hour talking and experimenting with Evan about it over Yahoo. It didn't go well, and that's part of the problem... no one is quite sure what is causing it so you have to try to pin down what is going on when it happens (were they invisible? what version of the yahoo client were they on? were they in your list? did it only happen when you didn't already have a message window open?) and because a lot of the Adium guys just don't use Yahoo much they don't come across it themselves. If they were, they could quickly track it down.
So, no problem, I'll do my part and try to help track it down... run a dev build and when it occurs, copy any relevant information from the console log and fire it off. While I was chatting with Evan about this, he got a little carried away and did something really, really cool. You'll notice in the new betas (both the special build above and the new betas) a new debug item under the Adium menu.
If you're having a problem or weirdness, you pull up that menu and it grabs the info from the last 100 messages or so. If you just leave it open, it continuously logs and you can just watch it all fly by. Really neat idea and will make things a lot simpler for those who are less technically inclined to send off information about what is actually going on when they encounter a problem, such as the Yahoo bug I'm wrestling with.
In terms of performance, it isn't anything to worry about if you leave it closed, and even open it's minor. So do keep it in mind if you encounter any weirdness and want to send in a report or an issue. And remember these are betas, designed to catch these sorts of issues before they hit the mainstream.
Posted by drunkenbatmanSeptember 30, 2004, at 05:51 PM
Comments (4)
Posted by: Mindflayer at October 1, 2004 01:16 AM
Sorry, DB - going to have to agree with Mark's comment. Yahoo!'s IM protocol may be wacky to Adium, but it's not too complex, either. We talked about this a few months ago, dude - were you drunk? *cough*federated*cough*
Posted by: Evan Schoenberg at October 4, 2004 03:37 AM
We musta miscommunicated about why I dislike both the MSN and Yahoo protocols :) A protocol is not inherently geared towards any particular platform; an implementation may be, but that's a different story.
To clarify, then: My biggest complaint about MSN and Yahoo is that neither supports proper HTML; I can't, for example, bold a single word in MSN - have to bold the hold message. It's small things like that. And the 'hairy' parts of the protocol, as Mark said, which Gaim with its relatively new implementation is still refining.
The main reason I don't use either heavily is that almost all my buddies are on AIM - the same is true of the other users of the development team, coincidentally - so the only reason I'm ever on MSN or Yahoo is to test or to communicate with other Adium users who message me there. I try hard not to favor AIM when coding - Lord knows I've spent an amount of time working on MSN and Yahoo disproportionate to the amount I personally use either of them.
Posted by: sangitha at December 6, 2005 11:24 AM
i'm eager to know the protocols of Yahoo,MSN and AOL .plz send me the information as soon as possible.
I know in terms of protocols themselves the MSN protocol is somewhat hated due to how windows-centric it is, but for any reason most of these guys gravitate towards AIM.
I'm not sure why you say that, as there is very little that I can think of that is Windows-centric in the MSN protocol. The MSN Messenger protocol is in most parts a simple text based protocol that is easily human readable. There are parts of it that are a bit more hairy - authentication is done via a series of HTTPS requests to Passport servers, and MSN 6 features such as user display pictures use a more convoluted binary protocol.
Apologies for overanalyzing half of a sentence, but it seemed to jump out at me :-)