GSOC Pidging Ideas

[Sanjeed Schamnad]

Hello all,
My name is Sanjeed Schamnad. I am a fourth year CSE undergraduate student
from India (College: BITS-Pilani). I would partake under the Google summer
of code-2015 program working under your organization.

I've gone through the Project ideas provided by Pidgin and am interested in
two particular ideas:
1)Android "proxy" client
2) Removing code duplication from the pidgin code database

I have completed courses on Computer networks which has given me a strong
foundation in how proxy clients work and how to implement them. I have done
courses in Datastructures and Algorithms and on Design and analysis of
algorithms which involved considerable debugging and optimization of code.

Given this skill set, I think I would be a good candidate for these
projects. I have a few other ideas for Pidgin and would like to know the
validity of these ideas as GSOC projects:

All these ideas are from a user point of view. These are the
problems/glitches I faced while using pidgin
1) If I copy paste some formatted text and send the message, instead of
resetting formatting by default, the previous messages format is still
available.
It might be good idea to both reset formatting after each message (with an
option to not-reset in settings) and have an easy way to paste without
formatting (just middle click instead of menu item).

A suggestion to solve this issue is to make middle-click paste without
formatting on X11 systems, and leave as it is for other systems. This could
be a reasonable default.

2) When you are able to see other's JID, and request info from conference,
it's requested from real JID instead of conference jid, but real server do
not always give info away for people who are not in contact list. So there
is no way to request info from  example at conference.xmpp.server/UserName
instead of  username at jabber.example .

Server won't send data if you are not in user contact list if you ask
directly, but it will if you ask via conference jid (and you are present in
the conference)

There should be the provision to route the request to the conference server
by default like it was in older versions. But we might still want to
request info from real jid though, as there is no other option to determine
if you missed enter message.
It might be a good idea to show real jid as field in info if pidgin knows
it; maybe make two menu items, request user info and request real jid info.
With second only active when conference settings allow you to see it 3) We
cannot ban whole servers still. "*/ban server.com <http://server.com>*"
would return an error even though it's valid ban if you send it via XMPP
console
4) We cannot ban a user with a space in his name. F*or users without spaces
"/ban username" would work *but for a user with a space in his nick, this
command won't work. We need to type "*/ban real at jid*".

These are the preliminary problems which me and my friends have faced by
extensively using pidgin. As an avid user of pidgin I would love to work
under the mentorship of your organization and help in making pidgin better.

I would request your help in going about drafting the proposal for GSOC-2015

Thanking you

*Sanjeed Schamnad*
Fourth year
MSc(Hons.) Chemistry
B.E. (Hons.) Computer Science


*Birla Institute of Technology & Science,* Pilani
Pilani Campus, Rajasthan 333 031, INDIA
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pidgin.im/pipermail/devel/attachments/20150308/6722a5dd/attachment.html>