being on 0.6.2 and using "daily ppa" in Kubuntu 12.10, KDE 4.10.5

Lately the contact list is populated correctly when I connect but after a while facebook contacts turn in to "freaky long number@chat.facebook.com" instead of "my contact name" as expected. Just to confuse things it is not consistent, some contacts stay with contacts name, others turn into a long number@chat.facebook.com

Is this due to my using daily dev version or have Facebook gone and changed API or something?

Does disconnecting and reconnecting to the Facebook account cause this to be changed, or does one have to fully restart Telepathy?

bcooksley wrote:Does disconnecting and reconnecting to the Facebook account cause this to be changed, or does one have to fully restart Telepathy?

Dis/reconnect temporarily solves it but after a while it is back to numbers. And I am now back on "standard" 0.6.0 version, the daily broke earlier today

Facebook has changed something. It's causing havoc with our backend.

It is affecting Emapthy too. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1204588
We are on the case.

Sorry for this.

David

Update:
It appears upgrading telepathy-gabble to 0.17.5 resolves this issue.

david_edmundson wrote:Facebook has changed something. It's causing havoc with our backend.

It is affecting Emapthy too. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1204588
We are on the case.

Sorry for this.

David

well I suspected as much so no need to apologise

david_edmundson wrote:Update:
It appears upgrading telepathy-gabble to 0.17.5 resolves this issue.

will see if I can somehow do that. A bit tricky as my version of Kubuntu is now "old" (12.10) and the daily ppa only serve versions 13.04 and upcoming 13.10

david_edmundson wrote:Update:
It appears upgrading telepathy-gabble to 0.17.5 resolves this issue.

Managed to download it (git clone) but can find no clues in README as how to compile??

I spoke to David on IRC and he told me that his previous statement about telepathy-gabble is not correct. The issue still exist even in git-master telepathy-gabble.

I also was told that using libkpeople might mask (i.e., hide, not solve) the issue. Will look into that.

Apparently PSI is also suffering from the same problem. So it's not even just Telepathy clients.

I'll try reporting it on the Facebook XMPP bug page. Facebook are sending some odd updates, but I'm not entirely sure who is at-fault here.

Facebook are at fault, they've acknowledged the problem.
Fix is to be released "in a couple of weeks".

Workarounds

There is a workaround available. It's not pretty, but it is an option.

Facebook have a publicly available beta server of their XMPP interface. This contains the fix.

This is at beta.chat.facebook.com. You can either create a new jabber account or run the following line:

Code: Select all

for account in `mc-tool list | grep facebook`; do mc-tool update $account string:server=beta.chat.facebook.com; mc-tool reconnect $account ;done;


That sounds simple enough...
Too simple. We then hit another problem.

Due to the odd setup of beta.chat.facebook.com it sends replies as though they are coming from chat.facebook.com. This causes our backend to assume something is wrong and disconnect. Technically I believe we (Telepathy) are at fault on this one.

To work around this you have to recompile telepathy-gabble and apply the following patch to telepathy-gabble. This is a bit of a bodge.
http://paste.kde.org/p156adace/

That sounds complex

I would recommend just waiting and Facebook will fix it.

Thanks for looking for a solution to this - as I kind of expected it is Facebook who goes dodgy, it has happened before. For now I will live with it rather than try beta facebook things. I consider it solved as we know why/how it happens and what we can or can not do about it

Only "strange" thing is that I do not see this if I use Kopete instead - but I am of course aware that the "backends" are different

for explanation see http://www.sharpley.org.uk/blog/facebook-problems

Kopete cannot connect to facebook anymore, too