Hi, Trillian, a windows messenger client with icq support, fails to send a proper characterset information with the icq messages, which is a known bug in trillian. There is no version with this bug fixed ATM and nevertheless windows users are often lazy to update. Gaim tries at least to convert the message with invalid characterset to UTF-8, but if that fails the message is lost and will not be displayed to the user, instead you get "(There was an error receiving this message)". This is not very helpful! My patch makes gaim try a bit harder in getting a useful message out of the data. When conversion to UTF-8 fails,it also tries the user charset, set for the account. The big advantage is, that i now can read all messages from my trillian friends ;-). So are there disadvantages? Yes,there are...as always. As Trillian does not send a charset with the message,also the user charset of the gaim account i only a guess. let's say someone sends you data in an russian encoding and your user charset is ISO-8859-1. As you can convert any byte to an ISO-8859-1 char, the conversion won't fail,but you also won't get any russian characters. (But perhaps a malformed message is still better than no message at all!). Of cause this example is designed, and IMO not very likely to happen, as most of your friends will use the same charset you use. The patch was rejected by the gaim developers on #gaim, because they don't want to work around broken clients. It's up to you to apply it or not. I think it can only make gaim better,as it increases compability. The orginal windows ICQ has no problems with trillian messages,but i don't know how they handle them. The patch will be attached. PS: sorry for bad english. :-/
Created attachment 39501 [details, diff] gaim-0.82.1-trillian-icq.diff
I would consider adding this with a new revision, but gaim will be releasing a new version this Thursday evening so I'm going to defer to that since both will require new stabilization process.
