Version: 0.7.3 (using KDE KDE 3.1.4) Installed from: SuSE RPMs OS: Linux SILC is a system like IRC (servers and channels), but uses encryption. There are command line clients and servers available. For developers there's a C toolkit. The software is released under GPL. It would be nice to have Kopete to offer a plugin... http://silcnet.org http://silcnet.org/software/developers/toolkit/overview.php
Just downloaded the library and took a look at the API docs. This protocol actually has a well documented external library with a decent API (although, it is C ) Yes, a surprise given our experiences :) I do not think it would be difficult for someone to create a plugin for this protocol if they had the desire / time to. However, I certainly won't since after 3.2 I have many IRC updates, and I also want to tackle the JS plugin. Perhaps the next time someone wants to get involved with Kopete and we don't know where to point them, we can point them here.
I've had a look at libsilc. It's not really very good for our purposes. It wants to either own the application's main loop, or get called by a timer (every 50ms or so). This seems unacceptable to me. It looks like we'll either need to find a less self-important SILC client library, or find some way to replace libsilc's scheduler with one of our own.
I also took a look at it, and i also started coding. I had a working SILC plugin for CVS HEAD until namespaces were introduced. My coding time is limited (it might increase during the cold season), and i have to not only remember what i did some weeks ago, i also need to look up a lot of stuff _and_ keep up with kopete API developement, so progress is slow. But: although the plugin lacke[d/s] most of the features that distinguish SILC from other protocols, i could go to a chatroom and chat, including actions and i think status changes were working, too. It worked smoothly (regarding CPU load and such) and i don't see the inacceptable things here. i have never programmed applications in pure C, but i just thought that's the way to do it in C. i did not tie the SILC library directly into the protocol but wrote a KDE wrapper for the library for reusability. next time i get some time on my hands, i will adopt the latest API changes and probably just release the code, so there will be something people can work on. i would be especially happy, having someone else working on the plugin implementation itself (Richard? ;) ), so i could focus on implementing the SILC features.
silc rulez
There is Silc Plugin available at http://brokenpipe.de/hp/wiki.cgi/KopeteSilc It looks really good. The important stuff works well, even filetransfers.
*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***