Bitlbee's AIM groupchat implementation does not support exchange designation

[wwinfrey@…]

When connecting to an AIM groupchat, it is not possible to designate an "exchange". I believe the default exchange for public chats is usually 4, but any groupchat created in Trillian uses exchange 5. Unfortunately, not being able to designate this exchange keeps me from participating in certain groupchats.

Since OSCAR, et al is not documented so well, the only pointers I could give you in terms of where to look for ideas on implementation would be to download the pidgin source and take a gander at:

pidgin-2.x.x/libpurple/protocols/oscar/family_chatnav.c

I have exactly zero experience in this area so I'm only guessing. Thanks in advance....

[wilmer]

This seems pretty easy, this is just a hardcoded number in oscar.c.

The hard part is putting it into the UI+API. I'll see what I can do. If you run your own BitlBee instance and mostly need rooms on exchange 5, try changing 4 on the line "cr->exchange = 4;" in protocols/oscar/oscar.c.

Thanks for the report and sorry for the extremely late followup.

[TheDeppchef <thedeppchef@…>]

*adding to the mail notice*

[wilmer]

Hey! I hope you're still looking for this because I have it mostly fixed. It's in changeset:devel,734. If you're a public server user I can push this to testing.bitlbee.org.

[wilmer]

changeset:wilmer-ui-fix,734, doh.

[wilmer]

I just merged ui-fix into mainline.

[anonymous]

Was this ever fixed? Would it be so hard to specify the exchange while adding the chat in bitlbee? Also you could just have bitlbee actually use the exchange information included in chat invites instead of defaulting to exchange 4. Love bitlbee but hate that I'm limited to exchange 4 chatrooms. Thanks in advance.

[wilmer]

Well see the above. It was fixed in 3.0...

Sadly the changeset: link is now dead, but see channel settings for an OSCAR chatroom, it'll include a setting called exchange_number . Looks like the setting is undocumented, but it's there.

[wilmer]

Also you could just have bitlbee actually use the exchange information included in chat invites instead of defaulting to exchange 4.

That I don't know, but if dx feels like figuring that one out I won't stop him. :-)

[dx]

wtf is an exchange

[anonymous]

Really late reply, but I don't exactly know how to explain what an exchange is in the oscar protocol, its beyond my technical grasp. If you'd like to check out pidgin to see what I'm talking about, when you go to join a room with pidgin on AIM, it'll say roomname and the default exchange is always 4, the reason we aim for higher exchanges is room size limit, exchanges 13+ have a 48 limit while 1-12 have a 38 user limit, I can possibly have a friend come and try to explain what exchanges are if it helps.

[dx]

Huh. Crazy stuff.

So I dug for the commit around the date wilmer posted that comment (bzr revision 734 pointed at the wrong commit), it's 03f38289e15c27b93f8fdecf22a03353e4d01096 now in the git world, and, well, confirmed what wilmer said above.

05:47:06 <@dx|icq> chat add oscar whatever
05:47:06 <@root> Chatroom successfully added.
05:47:11 <@dx|icq> channel #whatever set
05:47:11 <@root> account = `icq'
05:47:11 <@root> auto_join = `false'
05:47:11 <@root> chat_type = `room'
05:47:11 <@root> exchange_number = `4'
05:47:11 <@root> nick is empty
05:47:11 <@root> room = `whatever'
05:47:11 <@root> translate_to_nicks = `true'
05:47:11 <@root> type = `chat'
05:47:20 <@dx|icq> chan #whatever set exchange_number 5
05:47:20 <@root> exchange_number = `5'

So... apparently the only remaining issue here is that you have to set this magic value manually when getting a chat invite?

[anonymous]

And how does one do that?:)

[dx]

Do what? Setting the exchange number? It's right up there. channel #whatever set exchange_number 5