Procedure for starting development for beginners

[Richard Laager]

I assume you're on Linux.

Start small.

Grab the latest Pidgin tarball and build from source:
   Download the tarball from the website.
   Unpack it.
   ./configure
   make
   make install

Run the pidgin executable you just built. It should be
in /usr/local/bin/pidgin.

Now try to make some change. Edit pidgin/gtkdialogs.c. Find my name and
change it to yours. Re-run "make" and "make install". Re-start Pidgin.
Look at the Help -> About box and find your name. :)

From there, use your programming skills to make some changes and see how
they work. Later, if you have something to submit, you can read up on
how to use the diff program to submit a diff. Or you can checkout our
code from the repository instead of using a tarball. But those are more
advanced topics that you can learn later.

-- 
Richard
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