State of Pidgin: Introduction

[Gary Kramlich]

Greetings Programs!

As you may or may not know I did a live stream on September 14th that
included a discussion on the state of Pidgin.  You can find the recording
on youtube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2N4rWkkhSs> or twitch
<https://www.twitch.tv/videos/177586611?collection=d88aUP_T5xRbpw>.  It's a
bit long at 90 minutes, but please watch/listen before continuing.

During this broadcast, I mentioned that I was hoping to send out some
emails to open these topics to a broader audience.  I had hoped to get
these emails out the following weekend but life got in the way, and that
didn't happen.  But they're here now.

What follows is a series of emails.  Each on their own topic to avoid cross
talk and to attempt to keep the discussions on focused.  These all play
into my long term vision of where I think we should be taking Pidgin.  They
are fairly technical which means they're a bit long but they need
discussion to make sure they are the direction that we want to take Pidgin.

Most of these ideas have been in the making for quite awhile and I've even
tried to bring some of them up in the past before but they didn't generate
the amount of feedback where I felt comfortable pursuing them.

The ideas presented in these emails are as follows.  There are additional
topics I want to bring up in the future, but this are the higher priority
ones for me.

 * Build System
 * Splitting the Tree
 * The Webkit Dilemma
 * Project Infrastructure
 * Discrete Installs
 * Reverse Engineering FUD
 * Attracting and Maintaining New Contributors

I would like to get these all sorted out quickly, but all of these are big
changes and need to be discussed.  That said I'd like to set a soft
deadline of 2017-10-11 so we can hit the ground running after 2.12.1 is
released.

Finally, after these topics are hopefully consensus is reached we can start
discussing the road map for 3.0.0.

Thanks,

--
Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com>
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