Fwd: GSoC idea - Plugin repository on pidgin.im

[Gary Kramlich]

Ibrahim Awwal wrote:

<snip>

> With regard to native plugins, I actually hadn't even thought of that.
> I assumed that all plugins would be open source, but now I realize
> that even with open source you can't guarantee that the source
> corresponds to the binary without compiling it yourself, and I'm
> pretty sure it would be impossible to set up a pidgin build
> environment on Google App Engine. I also had a thought after writing
> that previous email; it should be a libpurple plugin database, since
> not all plugins depend on Pidgin specifically (am I right?) so eg.
> third party protocol plugins or plugins that don't depend on a GTK+
> GUI would work under Finch and Adium and hopefully Vulture if that
> gets off the ground this summer as well. Or should I just keep it
> limited to Pidgin plugins in the beginning but say, keep a field in
> the database for application, so that it can later be extended to
> other libpurple clients?

I've had some *CRAZY* and I mean **CRAZY** ideas for handling native
plugins.  Mainly because we don't see many tcl/perl plugins, the python
loader is, to the best of my knowledge still pretty new, and the mono
loader has some issues that were waiting to get fixed in upstream mono.

Anyways, these *CRAZY* ideas included something involving build
environments for the more popular distros/archs, that would be built
from a user supplied tarball, after it had passes some static analysis,
and hopefully a code review.  Although this could be rather trivial to
setup in our already configured, but barely used buildbot setup.

However, it would be nice to have a simple way to diff the changes
between versions if we were to do code reviews before we posted
binaries, but that'd obviously get more complicated with larger plugins.

Anyways, hope these ideas helped a bit...

> --Ibrahim Awwal

-- 
Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com>

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