A little guidance for protocol plugins

[Ka-Hing Cheung]

On Fri, 2009-05-08 at 17:30 -0700, Jeremy Smith wrote:
> Executive summary: I have an idea for a (hopefully pretty simple) 
> protocol plugin.  Basically, it would log in over SSH to a server, get a 
> pty, use a periodic `who` to get the buddy list (being the other users 
> logged in to that machine), and use the `write` command to send 
> messages.  In turn, it would listen on the pty for messages from other 
> users (as well as broadcast messages from `wall`).
> 
> I basically want to check that nobody has done this already, and to ask: 
> what's the best way to get started building and testing plugins?  I am 
> using Windows; have cygwin and mingw, and the pidgin source.  Is there a 
> skeleton protocol plugin I can start with?  And once I manage to build 
> my plugin, do I just drop it into pidgin's plugins directory and 
> restart?  I've never worked with gtk; am I going to have to write any 
> GUIs for configuring my plugin? (Specifying server, username, which RSH 
> to use, etc).

You can look at nullprpl for a basic example for writing protocol
plugins. A well written plugin should not use GTK directly.

-khc