issues with licq under ubuntu hoary

probably some other debian based distributions and debian itself are affected, too. what issues you might ask. well, licq runs just fine and if you don't have it up all the time together with your computer and the internet connection you might not recognize the little flaw: auto-away is not working. why is that? i tried to find out myself, but ran into an dead-end. i looked through the source of the qt-gui plugin (the standard and till the new gtk plugin reaches maturity the best one), found the lines responsible for enabling the auto-away timer and checking the status and addes some lines to get useful debug output on the console. all i got was "auto-away timer started". while reading the sourcecode i learned that licq relies on the xscreensaver libs to check for inactivity and that it has some checks built in, that warn you if you dont have the libs installed. i could not find these warnings in my logfile, so i assumed my libs are ok. at this point i decided that asking the guys on the licq mailing list was the best thing to do. the second reply from Jon Keating was very helpful. he suggested i should check the log files of the configure script for the qt-gui plugin. and guess what? the script did not find any xscreensaver libs on my system, but continued anyway with compiling. in my opinion this is very bad behaviour. the user should be warned that auto-away wont work if you dont have these particular libs installed. all i had to do now was install libxss-dev via synaptic (apt-get would have worked the same, but i like synaptic's search feature more) and recompile the gui plugin. at this point i was working with the latest daily snapshot of licq, but i wanted the ubuntu package to work. i grabbed the source via apt-get (synaptic does not support installing source packages), edited the package changelog and the version in the control file and rebuilt the licq packages. after removing licq from /usr/local and installing my own packages i had a fully working version of licq. of course the snapshot was working just as good, but i like having my software installed via apt-get. that way maintaining and updating the system is way more comfortable. i wrote an email to the guy, whose name and email was listed in the package information as maintainer, explaining what i have found out, but he said the he has nothing to do with ubuntu. now you might ask, why doesnt he use gaim, which is installed by default with ubuntu? i can give a very simple answer to that: gaim's user interface does not appall to me. it's too clunky. whereas licq's gui is minimalistic, but at the same time very stylish. it does not take over your workspace if you have it open all the time.