Bug Buddy gwibber FAIL - and a pidgin WIN

Posted by Monty Taylor on August 24, 2010 at 06:45 PM

gwibber, which is what Ubuntu tries to launch when I click "broadcast" in the little drop down menu (Ubuntu's current word meaning micro-blogging application) has been broken for me for weeks. It used to just not do anything... but since I upgraded to Maverick this week, I thought I'd check to see if it had started working again.

Nope.

But now at least I get a Bug Buddy crash window up - so at least I _know_ it didn't do anything.

Here's the next problem:

 

The application gwibber has crashed.
Information about the crash has been successfully collected.
This application is not known to Bug Buddy, therefore the bug report cannot be sent to the GNOME Bugzilla.  Please save the bug to a text file and report it to the appropriate bug tracker for this application.

That's sort of FAIL. Twitter is sort of a popular thing, and gwibber seems to be the chosen app in Ubuntu for this task. How Bug Buddy could not know about gwibber is beyond me. BUT - there's light at the end of the tunnel.

Some angry googling brought up exactly what I've been looking for my entire life:

pidgin-microblog

As usual, pidgin continues to be one of the best open source apps out there, in that it not only gets stuff done, but it gives me more features than my closed-source friends have in their lives. Additionally, it means I might actually be able to start participating sensibly in twitter world, since I've always been turned off by the fact that it's essentially just web-based async IRC except not as good. But now I can make it look like what it is in a user interface that works. YAY!

Yet one more reason for me to continue using Pidgin over Empathy (OTR being the first reason, in case you weren't following along at home)

So short story- bugs in gwibber == FAIL, but Open Source once again saves the day by having, oh, I don't know - CHOICE!

 

10 Comments

  1. [1]   CMD
    August 24, 2010 at 07:59 PM

    For Twitter try Pino, it's a lot more lightweight than Gwibber

  2. [2]   ethana2
    August 24, 2010 at 08:41 PM

    Um, the dude that writes Gwibber writes for Ars Technica. I think Ubuntu should require that all projects that come *on the CD* have Launchpad accounts.

  3. [3]   Kieran
    August 25, 2010 at 01:34 AM

    @ethana2 Gwibber is developing on Launchpad...

  4. [4]   pvradu
    August 25, 2010 at 01:36 AM

    I also use Pino for identi.ca and twitter, and works great on my EEE PC. Gwibber on the other hand, when it worked, because now it's not working anymore, it was very very slow. You can grab pino from here: http://pino-app.appspot.com/

  5. [5]   Jon
    August 25, 2010 at 01:37 AM

    Not sure how this is a win for F/OSS. There is plenty of choice of closed source twitter clients too. In fact, last time I surveyed twitter clients in Debian (the second half of 2009 I think), virtually all of them were of abysmal quality. I'm pretty sure gwibber was one of the ones I deemed terrible back then.

  6. [6]   samtygier
    August 25, 2010 at 03:41 AM

    the crash should launch apport not bug-buddy. yes gwibber (or couchdb that it requires) is very crashy

  7. [7]   Aoirthoir An Broc
    August 25, 2010 at 07:36 AM

    "Um, the dude that writes Gwibber writes for Ars Technica. I think Ubuntu should require that all projects that come *on the CD* have Launchpad accounts." Uh huh. Keep tellin' yourself that. There's an entire ecosystem of FOSS that is NOT based on launchpad.

  8. [8]   jjmartinez
    August 25, 2010 at 09:16 AM

    Open source is not only complaining, ranting, and at the end, moving to a different application. May be you can file a bug, in case you haven't done it yet, in Ubuntu packaged bug buddy requesting for support for gwibber. I guess bug buddy it's a Gnome upstream tool, so it only knows (probably) about Gnome project applications (it complains about Gnome Bugzilla). I agree with you: if bug buddy catches gwibber crashes, it should be able to report the problem in the right place.

  9. [9]   jorge
    August 25, 2010 at 09:23 AM

    Hi Monty, There were multiple problems yesterday throughout the day with twitter moving to it's oauth thing, my gwibber was constantly being kicked off and on. Seesmic ended up working for me and I thought "weird", but then I went back to check gwibber and it was working. I am curious as to why bug buddy came up, are you sure it wasn't the apport thing? Anyway the crash file is still likely on your system, run "apport-cli" in your terminal and that should get the bug data to launchpad.

  10. [10]   http://topsy.com/inaugust.com/post/86?utm_source=pingback&utm_campaign=L2
    August 25, 2010 at 12:46 PM

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