1583944 - Remove obsolete protocol code (Yahoo and Facebook)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Chat Core :: General, task)

Description

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

Attachment: Screenshot of account manager with Facebook/Yahoo

Support for Facebook and Yahoo were dropped previously in bug 1236133 (TB 45) and bug 1316000 (TB 52). You're no longer able to create accounts using these protocols, but if you had previously it will still show up (with the proper icon, etc.). If you try to connect them you'll get a message saying they don't work anymore (see attachment).

The time has come to fully rip out support for these, meaning they'll now show up as an "unknown" account type.

Note that Yahoo Messenger was completely shut-down on July 17, 2018. Facebook still has Messenger, but it is completely proprietary.

Comment 1

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

Attachment: Screenshot of the account manager with unknown accounts

This is what the account manager will look like after the proposed changes.

Comment 2

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

Attachment: Patch v1

Florian, we talked about this on IRC a bit. I confirmed the behavior of what these accounts will look like with the code removed, but check out the attached screenshots!

I greped a bit for Yahoo and Facebook after this and there's one or two references still:

• The OTR code has a bunch of hard-coded protocols in it that we don't support.
• The XMPP code has a comment about Facebook's XMPP server.
• A comment in prplIProtocol mentions Yahoo (and MSN).

Comment 3

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

Hmm. I think I was confused during our IRC discussion. I thought we still had actual code for these protocols, but it seems the prpls we had were just placeholders at this point. I wonder if it would look better to make the unknown prpl or the account manager handle differently protocols that used to be supported but have been removed. The "Error: No 'prpl-facebook' protocol plugin." message feels like technical jargon.

I don't care strongly either way.

Comment 4

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

Comment on attachment 9095464 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch v1

Review of attachment 9095464 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

I don't mind if you want to land this so r+, but I also don't really see how it's an improvement.

Comment 5

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

I agree that it too technical sounding. Frankly, it isn't terrible to just leave this code as-is. I don't think there's any benefit to adding code to unknown prpl / account manager to handle these specific cases.

Comment 6

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

Sounds like the better user experience is to just leave this code here, even though it is a little bit of cruft.