Today I tried to make the QQ protocol in Kopete under KDE 4.2 work. As I saw it, it has been ported from evaq some time ago. evaq stopped development in 2006! Since then Tencent stopped supporting different protocol versions. So the Tencent networks complains of a too old client version when Kopete tries to connect. A bug of this is already filed in November, but it’s not even confirmed, yet. There is even a bug filed in June what IMHO tells a different part of the same story. This bug isn’t confirmed, either.
Today I pulled the svn version of evaq and tried to port the QQ 2006 code to connect to the network. I had some success as the error message for a too old client disappeared. But I couldn’t get a real connection to QQ. I guess there is some work to do on this plugin. But I’m not experienced in KDE programming.
Pidgin somehow had some luck to find a maintainer who cares and its QQ implementation is still working. Unfortunately it isn’t just copy & paste from Pidgin to Kopete.
Where are all those Chinese people around there? Nobody using KDE? Nobody caring about QQ and Kopete?
I’m also very surprised that no one has fixed this. QQ is used by countless users in China, and in China, offers very fast file transfers. Its very convenient but I greatly dislike the fact that it is proprietary and forces users to use their very invasive-ad-filled interface. I highly suspect that installation of the program installs immense amounts of junk onto one’s computer. Also, the Linux version distributed by Tencent is poor and needs updating.
It would be a great benefit to the community if someone could fix the QQ plugin so we could use QQ with Kopete or Pidgin and avoid using the advertisement-laden QQ program provided by Tencent.
I seemed to notice as well that QQ does not work, probably they changed their handshake with the client and the devs on IRC freenode isn’t doing much help either as none of them responded to my question after repeatedly asked. Looking forward for solution, any help would be appreciated
Tencent is not a open company. Developers who try to support QQ on open platforms have been threatening by Tencent. I don’t think it worth to put any effort to support the QQ protocal. Most open source users and developers in China actually resist to use QQ.
Due to Tencent’s threatening, evaq is dead. So for Kopete support, I am very negative on that.
I can understand this position, but isn’t it the same for ICQ, AIM and so on?
At least Tencent has understood, that Linux is important. They are developing an own Linux client now…
The reason that Tencent released a linux client was not because it thought Linux is important.
It was kind of government request. China is promoting the LoongSon cpu, which can only run Linux.
It is commonly believe that the Tencent linux client is a product of government stress.
It is also interesting and somehow irony that Tencent has stopped development of the linux client.
I am not very familiar with ICQ, and AIM protocols. But I think the protocols do not change very much
from time to time. But the QQ protocol changes very frequently. Sometime tencent changes the protocal
dramatically just to kick out unofficial clients. For me, it is meaningless and wasting time to support and
maintain such a protocol in the Linux world.
Thank you for the closer view on Tencent. I didn’t knew that, yet.