[GSoC] Photo Sharing project proposal

[Valentina Manea]

On 03/21/12 05:35, Jorge Villaseñor wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 2:47 PM, Valentina Manea<valentina at rosedu.org>  wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> My name is Valentina Manea and I'm a second year Computer Science student. I
>> would like to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code as a
>> developer for Pidgin.
>>
>> I believe that an important missing feature is Yahoo!-like photo sharing.
>> While I do not believe that I can reverse-engineer the Yahoo! Messenger
>> protocol to enable a Pidgin client to use photo sharing while communicating
>> to a Yahoo! client, I have some ideas to do such a thing between two Pidgin
>> clients.
> Do you mean, implementing an ad-hoc protocol only working with pidgin clients?

Yes, something like that. I would like to make this work between a 
Pidgin client and a non-Pidgin client but that would mean modifying the 
non-Pidgin client as well.
The problem is that some clients, such as Yahoo! Messenger, are closed 
source. This would mean that I would have to do some reverse-engineering 
to make it work between Pidgin and Yahoo! Messenger. Presuming I would 
overcome this issue, this would still restrict photo sharing to the 
Yahoo! protocol.
I believe that even if this would work only between Pidgin clients it 
would be appreciated by users.

>> I have considered several options, each with pros and cons, and I think the
>> most feasible option is to implement a plugin to "piggyback" the photo
>> sharing traffic over the supported protocols.
> Can you elaborate on this different options?
Another option I thought about was a direct link between the 
communicating hosts (peer-to-peer); this channel would be used by the 
feature for control messages and data. Bypassing the server means that I 
would not have to "encode" the packets generated by photo sharing into 
the protocol; however, this is not a feasible option due to NAT.