view README.MTN @ 27161:7054f810b0f9

Check in code that connects to oscar using clientLogin. This is the authentication scheme they've publically documented. We still use the old MD5-style login as the default, but you can optionally try this out by checking a check box on the advanced tab of your oscar account. Functionally everything is supposed to be the same. However, for some reason users with Mobile IM forwarding turned on don't show up online and can't be messaged. Not sure why. Using clientLogin DOES make it easier for AOL to track us. And yes, it probably makes it easier for AOL to block us, too. But I don't believe they want to do that. I believe they're trying to keep their network open, and I think we should appreciate that and try to work with them. We're not just some small open source project that slips under the radar unnoticed anymore. It's good to have options, right? None of this code was taken from anywhere (outside of libpurple). I wrote it all from scratch (and took a few bits from other places in libpurple). I did use the documentation on http://dev.aol.com/aim , but I don't believe that affects us from a licensing standpoint in any way. If you disagree we should talk about it on the devel mailing list.

If you plan to use Pidgin, Finch and libpurple from our Monotone repository,
PLEASE read this message in its entirety!

Pidgin, Finch, and libpurple are a fast-moving project with a somewhat regular
release schedule.  Due to the rate of development, the code in our Monotone
repository undergoes frequent bursts of massive changes, often leaving behind
brokenness and partial functionality while the responsible developers rewrite
some portion of code or seek to add new features.

What this all boils down to is that the code in our Monotone repository _WILL_
sometimes be broken.  Because of this, we ask that users who are not interested
in personally tracking down bugs and fixing them (without a lot of
assistance from the developers!) use only released versions.  Since releases
will be made often, this should not prevent anyone from using the newest,
shiniest features -- but it will prevent users from having to deal with ugly
development bugs that we already know about but haven't gotten around to fixing.

If you are interested in hacking on Pidgin, Finch, and/or libpurple, please
check out the information available at: http://developer.pidgin.im

By far the best documentation, however, is the documented code.  If you have
doxygen, you can run "make docs" in the toplevel directory to generate pretty
documentation.  Otherwise (or even if you do!), the header files for each
subsystem contain documentation for the functions they contain.  For instance,
conversation.h contains documentation for the entire purple_conversation_*
API, and account.h contains documentation for the purple_account_* API.

If you have questions, please feel free to contact the Pidgin, Finch, and
libpurple developers by email at [e-mail] or on IRC at irc.freenode.net
in #pidgin.  Please do as much homework as you can before contacting us; the
more you know about your question, the faster and more effectively we can help!

Patches should be posted as Trac tickets at: http://developer.pidgin.im