Exporting Incoming IMs as Text Files

[Thomas Hruska]

Richard Laager wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-04-06 at 01:37 -0400, Ivan Kowalenko wrote:
>> On Apr 5, 2008, at 21.01, Luke Schierer wrote:
> ...
>> I'm wondering if I could get a recommendation on which is  
>> easier to learn and execute on a Windows system (blasphemy, I know,  
>> but the tools I'm trying to interface with only exist in Win32)
> 
> I believe we ship the Perl interface on Windows, but I've never used it.
> Writing this in C wouldn't be that terrible either. All you'd need to do
> is catch the received-im-msg signal and then write out a file with the
> contents. That said, if you're going to learn a language from scratch to
> do this, try Perl first. ;)
> 
>>> A third way would be to work with the dbus interface.
>> Could you explain this one to me? I'm not sure I'm familiar with it.
> 
> DBus doesn't exist on Windows, so in your case, you don't need to worry
> about it.
> 
> Richard

I just noticed yesterday that all the plugins written in C for Windows 
are about 500-800K _each_ - most of the source files are 12-20K.  I 
suspect a lot of the unnecessary bloat is due to Cygwin dragging in its 
junk during compilation.  My vote for new plugins is definitely the Perl 
scripting route - makes for a cross-platform plugin without compiling. 
Cygwin is "slow and bloated".  Perl is just as "slow and bloated". 
Relatively-speaking, I don't see a whole lot of difference.

I'm curious - are there any published Perl plugins out there other than 
the demo one on the Wiki?  Such plugins would be great examples and 
would significantly lower the bar when developing plugins for Pidgin. 
Based solely on what I've read in the Wiki, it seems like someone has to 
have a deep understanding of Perl, C, glib, and the Pidgin/libpurple 
source code to author a Perl plugin.  That is a steep learning curve.

-- 
Thomas Hruska
CubicleSoft President
Ph: 517-803-4197

*NEW* MyTaskFocus 1.1
Get on task.  Stay on task.

http://www.CubicleSoft.com/MyTaskFocus/