Yahoo! has made a change on their server that prevents Adium 1.3.4 and the 1.4 betas from connecting. We have released a new beta, beta 7, which contains the fix.

As we’ve noted before, 1.4 will require Leopard. Those of you who are still hanging on to Tiger are currently stuck, as we do not yet have a fixed version for you. We’ll release a 1.3.5 shortly after Libpurple 2.5.7 comes out, as that version will also contain the fix. (Libpurple, for those of you who don’t know, is the library Adium uses to connect to Yahoo! and most other services.) The Adium 1.4 betas use pre-release versions of Libpurple 2.6.

A number of you have reported being unable to sign into Yahoo! using Adium 1.2.2. We’ve discovered the problem; this post is to tell you what we did wrong and what we’re doing about it.

When you enter a Yahoo! email address (such as jdoe@yahoo.com) into the username field in Adium 1.2 and later, Adium strips off the @yahoo.com part before trying to sign in with it. This is because Yahoo! expects only the jdoe part (the username); signing in with the whole email address will result in an unknown-username error.

Back on the 11th of February, Evan committed this change:

Yahoo accounts shouldn’t include the @domain.suffix regardless of what it is (e.g. @yahoo.com, @yahoo.it). Generalize our removal to account for this.

Before that change, we looked for “@yahoo.com” specifically, and removed it if present. This didn’t work for other Yahoo! suffixes, such as “@yahoo.it”. Thus, Evan intended to make Adium delete all Yahoo! suffixes, not just the US one.

The code that Evan committed removes any email-address suffix—in other words, if there’s an @, Adium will remove that and anything after it before trying to log in. This was a good plan, except for those who use Yahoo! AT&T.

SBC was a US telephone company, which became AT&T back in 2005. SBC offered, and AT&T still offers, an internet connection with Yahoo! services bundled, including Yahoo! Messenger. Instead of a plain old “jdoe” username, these customers’ Yahoo! IDs are their entire “jdoe@sbcglobal.net” address. For these users, stripping off the “@sbcglobal.net” suffix makes sign-in not work.

So, this is a regression. I’ve already committed a fix: we now only strip the suffix if the suffix starts with “@yahoo.”, so that “@yahoo.com”, “@yahoo.it”, etc. will be stripped but “@sbcglobal.net” won’t). That fix is present in what will be 1.2.3. While we’re at it, we know of a couple other regressions which we’ll also fix in 1.2.3.

Thanks for your patience, everyone.

I’ve just finished writing a full account of yesterday’s bugfix scramble and posted it on my own blog. Those of you who are curious about how we operate may find it interesting reading. Enjoy. ☺

We’ve just released versions 1.0.6 (for Mac OS X 10.3.9) and 1.1.1 (for Mac OS X 10.4 and later) of Adium. These contain the Sparkle Plus fix that I mentioned previously, so you should now be able to run the check for updates with confidence. Thanks go to all the users who helped me track down the problem over this afternoon.

I just took 1.1 and the minimumSystemVersion elements out of our update feeds. This means that you’ll no longer be able to Sparkle-update to 1.1, but you also won’t crash on your update check.

Coming later tonight: 1.0.6 (for Panther users) and 1.1.1 (for Tiger users), at the same time.

What caused the crash?

First, a moment of context: The 1.1 series requires Tiger. We dropped Panther to make it easier for ourselves and our GSoC students to work on Adium; each OS upgrade brings with it new tools for us to use that we can’t use if we continue to support previous versions. So at some point, we drop one of the old OS versions so we can use new yum that the latest one has introduced.

So 1.1 won’t run on Panther. This is a problem for our Panther users; the latest version they can run is 1.0.5 (1.0.6, soon), but the update feed was promising 1.1. So Evan added some code to the update feeds to state that 1.1 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later; our updater is smart enough to not bother you about an update if it can’t run it, but only if the feed tells it the version that the update requires.

So far, so good. But Evan added the information as an attribute, and it’s supposed to be an element. (Don’t worry about the difference.) The result of this was that our Sparkle updater did not notice the minimum system version, because it was in the wrong place.

So, early this morning, I fixed the appcast, moving the minimum system version to an element, as it’s supposed to be.

That’s when it broke.

It turns out that our Sparkle Plus updater had a bug that caused it to crash when there’s a minimumSystemVersion element. When it was an attribute, it didn’t even see it (it doesn’t look there for that), so there was no crash. When it wasn’t in the appcast at all, there was no crash. But once it was put in properly, it revealed the crash.

This had been fixed in Sparkle, but somehow, the fix never made it to Sparkle Plus.

What now?

I’ve fixed the bug for 1.0.6 and 1.1.1. 1.0.6 is for Panther users, and 1.1.1 is for Tiger users.

We’re also changing the feed URL with these versions, in order to not break older versions of Adium (Zac points out that 12.4% of you are still using 1.0.4!).

First, I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to GEICO.

Second, I believe I’ve found the problem that makes the updater crash. If I’m right, it was a pretty simple should’ve-retained-that bug in Sparkle. If the fix works, we’ll have a 1.1.1 out sometime soon—if all goes well, within the hour.

Sorry about all this, people. But those of you who came to the IRC channel to help us find the problem, thank you very much.

For many people, Adium 1.1 is crashing on launch (specifically, at the moment where it automatically updates). We’ve had a few reports of this happening to 1.0.5 people as well, but almost all the reports now are from people who are fresh off of 1.0.5, on their first launch of 1.1.

We have a ticket on this: it’s #7542. This bug is already confirmed. We do not need more tickets nor any statements that you have the bug too. What we do need is help tracking down the bug.

We know that the problem is with our automatic updater, but we need help from people who are able to reproduce this issue in order to track it down precisely.

Right now, as I write this, I’m compiling a debug version of Adium that we’ll distribute to a few people on the IRC channel. If you have programmer skills and a working installation of Xcode 2.4.x, we invite you to drop in and help us step up to the bug. We have no reason to believe that this version is fixed; this is a debugging version. If you don’t have programmer skills, using the debug version will not help anything—we certainly hope that it still has the bug, so that we can find the bug and fix it.

So if you fit the above criteria, please come by and help us out. We would appreciate it.