[Pkg-privacy-maintainers] Bug#830796: pidgin-otr: You don't have OTR link could be more useful to debian users

[intrigeri]

Control: reassign -1 libotr5
Control: affects -1 + pidgin-otr

Hi Sam!

Sam Hartman wrote (11 Jul 2016 16:20:46 GMT) :
> As a co-worker just pointed out to me it's really hard to get from
> there to finding that you want to run apt-get install pidgin-otr.

Understood. I concur with this assesment, and sadly the alternate/new
OTR entry point (https://otr.im/) is even worse in this respect: it
points to a Pidgin download.

> I understand this issue is complicated, because there's no guarantee
> that just because I'm using Debian the person I'm talking to is.

Indeed. Also, just because I'm using Pidgin does not imply that the
person I'm talking to is: Debian includes multiple IM clients that
support OTR. Now, I think we should optimize for less technical users,
as those who use irssi or similar have more chances to find an OTR
plugin for their client by themselves; so, as pidgin-otr probably
provides the best OTR experience available on the Debian desktop
currently, I agree we should probably point users to it.

> First, I think that in a number of cases you can tell whether the remote party is
> Linux--I think XMPP especially does the capability negotiation to figure that out,
> although I can totally understand not wanting to deal with that.

It would be great to have such auto-detection in place.

I am curious if IM clients (e.g. Pidgin) give access to this kind of
info via the interface they offer to their plugin (e.g. pidgin-otr),
so that libotr could use it to generate a different message.

Alternatively, the auto-detection could be done on the web page that
libotr points to.

Either way, this looks like a non-trivial project, and IMO it's of the
kind that will benefit from having UX people involved right from
the beginning.

Are you interested in starting a conversation with upstream about it?

Otherwise I can relay this idea to their bug tracker
(https://bugs.otr.im/) myself. But I won't get involved more seriously
than that in this endeavour.

> Secondly, it would be nice if some Debian specific text could be added in addition to
> the generic text, because after all using Debian to talk to Debian is a reasonably
> common thing.

OK.

The current format string is:

 "?OTR%s\n<b>%s</b> has requested an "
 "<a href=\"https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/\">Off-the-Record "
 "private conversation</a>.  However, you do not have a plugin "
 "to support that.\nSee <a href=\"https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/\">"
 "https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/</a> for more information.";

We could insert the Debian-specific note e.g. this way:

 "?OTR%s\n<b>%s</b> has requested an "
 "<a href=\"https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/\">Off-the-Record "
 "private conversation</a>.  However, you do not have a plugin "
 "to support that.\nIf you are using Pidgin in Debian or Ubuntu,"
 "install the pidgin-otr package.\n"
 "See <a href=\"https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/\">"
 "https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/</a> for more information.";

What do you think? (I'm not a native speaker.)

Cheers,
-- 
intrigeri