GSOC Chat log storage: My thoughts

[Ka-Hing Cheung]

On Sat, 2013-04-20 at 05:51 +1000, Peter Lawler wrote:
> To my mind, a Chat Log storage format update would abstract out the 
> storage medium for the log. This would mean SQLite, MySQL, Postgres, 
> SMTP, SNMP, FTP, WebDAV, JSON, CSV or flat file logging 'plugins' would 
> be able to be written by anyone else. Naturally, taking this approach, a 
> GSOC2013 project would supply at least one of these backend plugins as 
> proof that it's working. This would keep with the general 
> pidgin/libpurple philosophy of abstraction and extensibility.

One idea I've had is to interoperate with gtalk's IMAP chat log, so the
logging side would be no-op and viewing would fetch from the IMAP server
(and possibly cache locally). Ideally if you use a non-gtalk account,
you would be able provide your own IMAP server and logs would be stored
there. Searching would be done on the server side.

If the pidgin crew agrees, I am willing to come out of retirement to
mentor this given a good application. A good applicant should:

1) demonstrate that they have done research on what's necessary to bring
the remote logging branch to main
2) demonstrate that they have thought about some of the problems of
storing logs on an IMAP server
3) demonstrate that they can code by providing a sample program that
connects to an IMAP server and list some emails.

-khc