Video/audio support

[Luke Schierer]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2007 at 01:52:07AM +1100, Carlos Eduardo Medaglia Dyonisio wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Asking about video support for pidgin at #pidgin, this is the answer I
> received: "it's a nontrivial (though not enormous) job, and no one who wants
> it can write it, while no one who can write it, wants it."
> 
> I know it is nontrivial, but it is not hard enough to take 2 years to do
> it. Some other programs already support it, and one of them (amsn) is a
> really crap piece of software, and it still supports video streaming (and
> everything else crashes...).
> 
> Well, I want to do it. And I can do it. I just want to know the guidelines,
> the rules, everything, because I don't want to waste my time adding
> something cool to a great software like pidgin, and have my patch rejected
> because someone wasn't in a good mood (it happened to me once with gaim).
> 

There is at least some work towards it in the im.pidgin.pidgin.vv branch
of mtn.  This branch is out of date, and im.pidgin.pidgin needs to be
propagated to it.  I believe there are some 3 way merges involved in
that effort.

Once that's done,  that would be the place to start working on this.  It
needs to be core/ui split,  which means that 

1)No gtk code goes in libpurple/ or any of its subdirectories
2)the code that is specific to a single protocol should go in
libpurple/protocols/
3)leaving the "top" level of libpurple/ generic and able to be used
cleanly across the many protocols supporting audio, video, or both.
4)UI code goes in pidgin/ and finch/ (you need not work on both).
5)the UI should be the same for the same feature on any protocol, even
if the protocols use different terminology
6)the UI should not reach into libpurple/protocols/


luke