libpurple and imprudence

[chris-tuchs at hushmail.com]

Hi again,

Maybe my first message was too broad in scope?  My general goal
is to hack imprudence into looking like plugins to libpurple.  To
do that I need to learn to write libpurple plugins.

The docs I found at
http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/CHowTo/BasicPluginHowto seem good
in general.  In detail though, when I try to follow and get to
the point it says "download a source tarball. You will want to
use the source tarball that matches the version of Pidgin you are
running", then I run into my first problem.

I'm not running pidgin, and though I will if it makes starting
development easier, I eventually will stop using pidgin and
switch to using imprudence.

The second problem is how do I find what is the correct version
of the tarballs for the libraris/dependancies that "sudo apt-get
build-dep pidgin" ensured were installed?  And/or the ones that
pidgin needs?

The third problem is, assuming I knew what version to get, where
would I find the source tarballs?  That also isn't obvious to me
from the website.

Really, I am not clueless.  I've done this kind of work before,
and thousands of people are using the results right now.  I won't
be nearly so noisy after I get started, I suspect, but getting
started is daunting me.

Help please?

Chris