developement tasks and pgp for windows

Hi,

1)I would like to see pgp support also for windows. Is it planed?

2)I am not that experienced with tcl, I did never touch tk, but I have "some" clue.

Maybe create a roadmap where you say where development will lead into (voice chat maybe?)...

Additionally you could create some task which could be outsourced for new developers. What you say?

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Re: development tasks and GPG for Windows

[quote=rus]
1)I would like to see pgp support also for windows. Is it planed?
[/quote]
"Planned" isn't the correct term for this case. Tkabber uses tclgpgme as a glue between Tcl and the gpgme library (i.e. it doesn't have any GPG code in itself). The problem is that this works for Unix systems, but not for Windows. This is because tclgpgme has several issues:

  1. It's unmaintained for a long time, so that it cannot even be built against contemporary versions of gpgme anymore. To bring GPG support in Tkabber to a fresh state, someone should either fix (or even re-write) tclgpgme to match the changes in the gpgme API, or write some other Tcl extension to interface Tcl to GPG.
  2. No one has yet created a binary build of tclgpgme for win32, and doing this is a major undertaking due to the reasons outlined below.

In other words, the present state of affairs regarding PGP support in Tkabber is not good: it still works in Unix systems but since it introduces dependencies on unmaintained version of gpgme (and, probably, GPG itself) it cannot be said to be up to date; for Windows it just doesn't work due to the lack of a binary build of tclgpgme and dependent libraries.

If you can read Russian (as your nickname suggests), you can read this article on Tkabber wiki.
[quote=rus]
2)I am not that experienced with tcl, I did never touch tk, but I have "some" clue.

Maybe create a roadmap where you say where development will lead into (voice chat maybe?)...
[/quote]
Tkabber doesn't have any "official" roadmap and is unlikely to have one in the future, and here is why: while the development cannot be said to be stagnated, Tkabber is being developed by a very small number of developers (actually it has just one committer) which are quite happy with the features Tkabber currenly has.

So any new features are added almost sporadically when someone has an urge to implement one or another feature for some reason.

Due to this, there's no such thing as even a mid-term planning, and hence there's no any roadmap.

As to voice chat, it's considered as "nice to have a plugin implementing this", but no one currenlty has any needs and/or willing to glue libjingle (or whatever) to Tkabber.
Also, "instant messaging" (and XMPP) is traditionally considered by most people as a means for exchanging textual data so the very idea of grafting support for voice/video chat to a textual chat client is questionnable.
Providing solid cross-platform support for this also looks like a major problem.

[quote=rus]
Additionally you could create some task which could be outsourced for new developers. What you say?
[/quote]
I don't quite understand what do you mean.
If you're about to ask "is it possible for a new people to participate?" -- then surely yes, it's possible: just drop a letter in the tkabber-dev mailing list for example, or join tkabber@conference.jabber.ru and explain what do you want to do (teo and kostix are the guys to talk to).

In fact, you can just send patches to the current maintainer (sgolovan at nes.ru or sgolovan at gmail.com), but if the code you want to incorporate isn't trivial to develop, better get in sync with the active developers as stated above.

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