[GSOC 2013] Easy plugins with a website

[Mark Doliner]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Tomasz Wasilczyk <tomkiewi at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've done a mockup [1] for this project idea, please comment it.

Looks good to me.  I think there are a lot of possible ways to
implement the UI that we would be happy with.  The UI isn't the part
of this project that I worry about.

I worry about:
- How to build plugins for a variety of OSes?  Windows is probably
easy.  For Linux... would we statically link to dependencies?  Maybe
for everything except glib and gtk?  And who should build the plugins?
 Should we require plugin authors to upload various binaries?
Creating an automatic build system that builds for Windows and various
Linuxes is a significant amount of effort, and probably not worth the
time.

- As a Linux user I try to only install software using my package
manager.  Installing software via this interface would be hard to go
through the package manager.  Installing plugins in ~/.purple/ isn't
so bad... but it CAN lead to confusion if the user ALSO installs the
plugin via their package manager.  If there are two versions of a
given plugin installed, which one should we use?  We currently don't
do a good job of messaging this problem to the user.

> I think, that student, who gets accepted with this project (assuming,
> this project will be chosen at all) *shouldn't touch website at all*,
> before having Pidgin/libpurple part completely done. The point is,
> that client part is easy to under-estimate and inexperienced student
> could focus on (easy, but possibly infinitely time consuming) website
> part, not leaving enough time to do the rest well.

This is a very astute observation.  I agree.  Thank you.