Old paradigms...

[Gary Kramlich]

Greetings Programs!

It's been on my mind for awhile know that the concept of a "buddy
list" is foreign to a lot of people, let alone the notion of a
"buddy".  I know this naming convention dates back to the being
AIM-centric, but I'm wondering if it's time we move away from it.  I'm
writing this as there's a user in #pidgin that just quoted "buddy"...

What I'm thinking is renaming Contact to MetaContact, Buddy to
Contact, and BuddyList to ContactList.

This is obviously a huge change that would affect nearly everything
which is why I wanted to discuss it before doing anything.  That said,
this has disastrous effects third party developers, even more so when
considering that they're trying to support purple2 and purple3... To
combat that I have another idea that's been floating around my head
for awhile...

I've noticed in a bunch of Eion's plugins, and I'm sure others, that
there are purple-compat files... What if we brought those in tree,
added a define to toggle it and then maintained it until, 3.2 or
something to make it easier for people to port and maintain.  However,
that could get very large very quick, so what if instead it was a
separate library they could link do that'd do the API compatibility?

I'm just spit balling here, but we need to address this as
ChangeLog.API is, and has been for awhile now, completely out of
control and no one should ever be expected to understand all of those
changes and how they are affected by them.

Please discuss!

Thanks,

--
Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com>