GSoC. Pidgin for Android

[Ka-Hing Cheung]

On Mon, 2010-03-29 at 11:36 -0700, Mark Doliner wrote:
> 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.

>From the referenced link, looks like most of the dependency and
libpurple itself are already ported, so most of the project would just
involve implementing the UI.

-khc