Inclusion of MXit plugin into Pidgin

[Mark Doliner]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 9:50 PM, John Bailey<rekkanoryo at rekkanoryo.org> wrote:
> Kevin Stange wrote:
>> I am generally in favor of doing this, provided you're willing to
>> subscribe some of your support team to our "support" mailing list and
>> field questions about the mxit plugin and help us expand documentation
>> on our wiki to include login and usage help.  Presence in our IRC
>> channel and on other lists would be welcome as well.
>
> Yes, this would be a great first step toward including the plugin in Pidgin.
> Getting involved in the community and helping us to support the plugin will
> greatly smooth the bumps in the road.

I'm in favor of this with a few assumptions.  In addition to what
Kevin mentioned above:

* I don't think any of us have experience with MXit, and we would
expect you to maintain the plugin.  That means we'd give you access to
our version control system (we're using Monotone) and you could check
things in, fix bugs, add features, etc.

* You would have to follow our design guidelines
(http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/DesignGuidelines )

* We should probably look over your existing code and make sure we're
comfortable with it.  Like, make sure it doesn't scan the user's hard
drive for pictures of earthworms, or link against any crazy libraries,
or break the user's expectations, or have buffer overflows, or crash
on the 76th second of every Tuesday

>> It's certainly not my decision to set you up with commit access, but I
>> would think having you work on your development in a mxit monotone
>> branch, which we occasionally propagate to our primary branch for
>> "release ready" code would be reasonable.  This is how we handle the
>> OpenQ project for QQ support as well.  Other developers should chime in
>> with opinions. :)
>
> I know I've objected to including more prpls before, particularly the Facebook
> Chat plugin, but in this case I have no preference one way or the other.  If we
> are to accept the plugin into our tree, I agree that it should be handled in
> much the same way that we handle the QQ plugin--have a team that works on a
> separate branch that can be merged back to im.pidgin.pidgin at release-ready points.
>
> Also, as a side note, we can't do this for 2.6.0 as we're already in string
> freeze.  If it's decided we want to have the plugin in-tree, it will have to be
> for 2.6.1 or some future version.

I don't feel like a separate branch is necessary, but I have no
objections to it if that's what people want.

-Mark