GSoc Proposal of "plugin management feature & emotion management feature"

[Ka-Hing Cheung]

On Thu, 2010-04-08 at 00:25 +0800, ollir zhang wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> 
> I'm ollir zhang, a Chinese student of Software Engineering, I would
> like to do the following two enhancements:
>      1. Add plugin management feature into pidgin. For user, it
>         enables preview/download/install/config/uninstall in one view.
>         For plugin developer, it provides scripts to distribute/upload
>         plugins. Of course, it requires a plugin depository online. 

How do you plan to handle building of C plugins?
What's the process of screening malicious plugin, and what's the
workflow like?

It may not be necessary to completely answer those questions in the
application, but at least I think you should show that you've thought
about those problems, even if your solution does not completely solve
them. (Something that works for only 50% of the plugins is still
infinite times better nothing)

Also, better breakdown of your estimate schedule would be nice.

>      1. Add emotion management feature into pidgin. Which includes
>         emotion cache(in ideas list). It help users manage
>         self-defined emotions, download/load emotions from official
>         depository in one view. Of course, we can define emotions as
>         ascii codes and use cache to save bandwidth. eg, :-) as smile.
> Detailed descriptions about this two enhancements, please have a look
> at my proposal,

I think plugin management is going to be significantly more difficult
than emoticon management, and it doesn't seem like your timeline
reflects that. I am not sure if anyone could finish both in GSoC.

-khc