No subject

[chris-tuchs at hushmail.com]

Hi,

If this is the wrong list for asking about building a new program
using libpurple, I apologize.  Please disregard the rest of this
email, and (politely please) tell me where to go.

I am a developer working on clients for "grids" like SecondLife.
SecondLife and clones are organized as a set of central servers and
many distributed client programs.  These grids (the generic term I
will use since there are many clones of SecondLife grid) include IM
features.  The clients for the grids (and there are more than one
'brand' or 'fork' of the client source base) naturally implement 
these
IM features and present them to users.

My current goal is to provide OTR features (and maybe other cool
stuff) in a grid-client.  The actual client source base I am working
with is imprudence, but that probably doesn't matter to y'all.  Some
time ago I integrated libotr into a grid-client (Emerald) and I 
know I
can just do that again.  But co-developers urge actually integrating
with libpurple instead.

The advantages are IM out and IM in.  By IM out I mean send/recieve
Yahoo!  IM's from inside your grid-client making one fewer reason to
ever leave ones "Second Life" for their "First Life."  By IM in I 
mean
"Pull the grid-client IM module out, plug it into some other 
libpurple
based client, and chat with your grid-friends at work."  Which looks
pretty cool to me!

>From a pidgin / libpurple perspective I have a cool (though huge)
program that already does IM and I want to hack libpurple in with 
it.

So... where do I start?  What should I read?  What should I download
to my Linux development environment?  Anyone working on something
similar?

Chris