This news fills me with disapproval. I just don't know how else to put it. As far as I know, Adium is the only chat client for OS X that is primarily based on Gaim (using libgaim).

And now they're planning to use joscar in their 1.0 release. Of course they'll have to keep libgaim around for anything that's not AIM, ICQ, and .Mac. The reasons are a little bit painful to me, and a little on the lazy side.

First of all, I remember months ago - or maybe even a year ago now - reading a post on their forum from one of the lead developers saying that they'd never break away from libgaim, and that adding joscar or something similar on top of libgaim was unneeded bloat. I agreed.

What features will joscar bring to Adium? The two cited in the blog post are file transfer and Direct IM for the oscar-based services, and "a cleaner codebase," and that they say it's faster.

Allow me to pick this apart piece by piece. First, let's address the speed. I, personally, don't think it works that way - a faster library isn't really going to mean much when it adds bloat to the application. And, frankly, libgaim is plenty fast!

Cleaner codebase is legitimate, but also a little silly. Why? Well, if they need to modify code in one library they're probably going to have to do the mod in both. Now they have to understand two libraries instead of just one, modify two libraries instead of one, update two libraries instead of one, keep track of two libraries instead of one. Doesn't this seem like an awful lot of extra work just to get a cleaner codebase?

And on to everyone's favorite sore spot - file transfers and Direct IM. I'm afraid I'm going to call foul on this one. Gaim 2, and libgaim 2, which are now in their third beta release, include this functionality.

So, Adium developers, what's the real reason you want to switch to joscar? And make it a good one, or don't do it!