Gsoc proposal - Improved chat log viewer

[Catalin Badea]

Hello,

My name is Catalin Badea, I study computer science at "Politehnica"
University of Bucharest. I'd like to work on a Pidgin project for this
year's Google Summer of Code.
The project I'm interested in is improving the chat log viewer. I'll
present my ideas so far.

Target Features:
- Unified log viewer for all contacts using a tree-like structure
The chat log UI should be able to provide a simple way to access ones' history.
Conversations will be grouped by person and further grouped by time stamps.
- Based on persons (meta contact)
The chat log should follow the buddy list model and identify based on
persons instead of accounts from different chat services.
- Offer some grouping based on statistics
I think it would be interesting to be able display certain statistics about
the chat history (e. g. favorite chat buddies).
 - Search box
The search box will provide a simple way display chat history with a
specific buddy (or from a certain time interval maybe).

Notes regarding the implementation:
- I think most of changes/addition will be related to the pidgin module and
not libpurple. The storing of the chat logs (as implemented) by
libpurplewill remain unaffected.
- Another important aspect the implementation should be using eficient data
structures and algorithms, since ,from what I understand, pidgin is
single-threaded. For example, I
think that real time pruning will work best by storing  the contacts in a
trie.

Progress so far:
I've read some of the code base. I'm trying to better grasp how the logs
are being handled and how libpurple/pidgin works in general.
I'd like to work on some small bugs as exercise - but I'm a bit puzzled
about the tickets from trac since most of them are very old. Therefore, if
anyone could suggest some
introductory tasks I'd be very grateful.

Also, how does your release process work? I've noticed there are two
roadmaps: 3.0.0 and 2.10.3.

Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.

Regards,
Catalin Badea
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