GSoC. Pidgin for Android

[Mark Doliner]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 3:41 AM, Artem Drach <artem.drach at gmail.com> wrote:
> My name is Artem Drach, I'm an undergraduate in one of technical
> universities in Ukraine.
>
> I'd like to ask you, what do you think about porting Pidgin/libpurple
> to Android as a GSoC project?
> It's a good piece of work, and a guy started doing it here [1].
>
> As far as I see, apart from technical challenges there may be a
> mentoring one. In fact, this project wouldn't contribute to the Pidgin
> code base. It looks like a separate project with all mobile platform
> details and porting difficulties. What do you think, is it worth to
> start going in depth creating an estimate and a proof-of-concept? If
> it's ok, I'll ask a guy from [1] for his plans, maybe tomorrow we'll
> see a finished project from him :)
>
>
> [1] http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~dtbartle/pidroid/

Hi Artem.  I think it's a cool idea, but might be a lot of work for
the benefits that it offers.  I think you would probably need to port
libpurple (not Pidgin), then re-implement the entire UI using native
Android widgets.  This is a fairly large task.  I suspect the final
packaged program would include all the libraries and the new UI, and
would probably be fairly large compared to other Android applications.
 Maybe 10MB?  It WOULD be nice to have a free-as-in-speech IM client
for Android (they may be one already?), but I'm not convinced that
porting libpurple+dependencies is the best approach.

--Mark