Announcement Pidgin SIPE

[Ethan Blanton]

FYI, there's some real dicussion about this going on amongst
developers, it just hasn't been on the list.  Several of us understand
and acknowledge that this situation has been far from ideal, and we
are working on way to get it fixed in a long-term fashion.  It is
clear to me, at least, that there simply is not an active Pidgin
developer with the time, energy, and/or expertise to handle VV issues
at the moment.  We'll come up with something, stay tuned.

Niklas Andersson spake unto us the following wisdom:
>  Ericsson and Tieto are almost done with taking Lync to Linux, and
> this month we will do the final integration of the FreeRDP-libraries
> with Pidgin SIPE.

This is great.

>  After that everyone will be able to enjoy Lync on Linux with full
> desktop screen sharing working both ways. I can only say that it
> will be impressive.
> 
>  Tieto and Ericsson is planning to do a public announcement about
> this in November (tentative during Ubuntu Summit)
> 
>  All our code is Open Sourced and sent upstream, but AFAIK the
> patches sent to Pidgin is not yet incorporated in trunk.

That is correct.

>  It would of course be nice to say that all code is already in
> upstream, but if we have to point to our own PPAs and github I guess
> we have no other option.

These are two somewhat different issues; accepting these patches
upstream won't necessarily mean that they're in an upstream *release*
for some time yet.  I don't recall if they require API changes or just
additions; if they require only backward-compatible additions the
delay would be much shorter.

That said, we absolutely do need to get them integrated wherever they
belong sooner rather than later.

>  We are also onboarding more developers to help out with fixing
> Pidgin-bugs, and I would very much prefer to do this in concert with
> any Pidgin dev upstream, instead of maintaining a fork we are doing
> right now.

Understood and agreed.

Ethan