GSOC idea : file transfer plugin

[Etan Reisner]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 06:57:27PM -0400, Evan Schoenberg wrote:
>
> On Mar 24, 2008, at 6:52 PM, Roberto Barboza Jr wrote:
>
> > I would like to know if i could develop this idea as my GSoC project.
> > It seems well explained to me (i couldn't explain better or add
> > anything to the idea right now), so if it's ok, i'll read the dev wiki
> > to start planning how this could be done.
>
> I don't think the 'file transfer plugin' (basically an FTP server
> implemented as a Pidgin plugin) is within appropriate scope of the
> project.  There are plenty of existing solutions to file sharing,
> including solutions provided by the protocols themselves.  Do any
> other developers disagree and think this would be a project for which,
> as described in Jean-Grégoire Foulon's email, they would vote when it
> comes time to accept or reject proposals?
>
> -Evan

I agree completely, implementing an entire ftp/http server inside pidgin
is not at all something I think appropriate for pidgin nor do I
particularly think it is something complex enough to be a valid SoC
project (especially given the fact that Sean's book _Open Source Messaging
Application Development: Building and Extending Gaim_ has a *very*, *very*
simple webserver in a plugin as one of the code examples for Chapter 7).

Extending the webserver plugin from the book to handle accepting a "path"
and serving different known files based off of that path should not take
much time, assuming you don't intend to make it a full-fledged http server
or anything.

I also happen to think there really aren't that many people for whom such
a plugin would truly be useful, and I would much rather see more broadly
useful projects undertaken as part of the Summer of Code.

If this project idea is in fact not even to create a plugin to actually do
anything but rather to create a plugin to manage transacting the transfer
type information, the location and port information, and the
login/credential information to an existing ftp/http/scp service (which
increases the complexity of the deployment of this plugin considerably)
then I think this is even less of a meaningful project since a person
could do all of this without the plugin just fine. (I'm assuming the
plugin wouldn't set up the ftp/http/scp service for the user as that would
quite likely be rather impractical if not downright impossible.)

    -Etan