annotate PLUGIN_HOWTO @ 14990:633d4c25e82c

[gaim-migrate @ 17769] Change oscar-to-aim-and-icq hack. This does the renaming gtkgaim, after everything's initialized (so it fixes broken Persons and pounces and savedstatuses, but it introduces a hack in gaim_account_get_protocol_id(), since some initialization requires the protocol id to match the plugin. I don't really like this, but it's the best workaround I could think of. Hopefully we can remove this after not-long. committer: Tailor Script <[e-mail]>

For information on writing a plugin for Gaim, go
http://gaim.sourceforge.net/api/ and see the HOWTOs in the
"Related Pages" section.

You can also generate this documentation locally by installing
doxygen and graphviz dot, then running "make docs" in the Gaim
source tree.  The documentation will be in the docs/html directory.

This next paragraph is old and possibly out of date:
Compilation of the plugins is fairly straight-forward; there is a
Makefile in this directory that has a rule for making the .so file
from a .c file. No modification of the Makefile should be necessary,
unless if you simply want to type 'make' to have it made; otherwise,
'make filename.so' will take filename.c and make the .so plugin from
it. If you need to link in with extra libraries, you can set the
environment variable PLUGIN_LIBS to be the libraries you want to link
with.

It should be possible to compile plugins outside of the Gaim source
tree, which is a much cleaner solution.