Libpurple in GSoC 2012

Libpurple was accepted in the Google Summer of Code  this year 2012.

I urge every student reading this to apply for any of the projects accepted and if you like, apply to Libpurple.

We have a set of proposed ideas but you are encouraged to bring your own ideas since they will be fresher and will not compete with other people over the same project.

You can find libpurple's application page at Pidgin, Finch and libpurple.

MSNP16 and SLP-rewrite merged

I have just pushed the revision that merges my MSNP16 and SLP branches to the main development branch in pidgin. I'm very happy to have this branches merged since they represent almost all the code I have been writing on the last year.

Yes I have started coding MSNP16 support almost a year ago and it took a lot of effort, reverse engineering, debugging Wireshark dumps and a lot of pidgin debug logs to get it working. That is a lot of time!

It is true that the MSNP16 code was almost complete when I started my SoC work but I though it would be better to start the SLP rewrite over the MSNP16 branch to be able to easily test both codes at the same time and try to get it in a better shape before merging it to i.p.p.

I know I have announced this merge like two weeks ago, but you know, I wanted this merge to be followed by a reasonable "beta" testing before being released and at that time it got that we had an security issue and needed to release 2.7.4. Once it was out, there were some ICQ issues that needed a quick release to fix that bugs, so we got a 2.7.5. Now I was able to merge and get a normal release cycle to get beta testers to find bugs in this new and nice code.

I hope this code will fix more issues than it brings up, specially the ones related to data transfer. Since most of the code on this area have changed due DirectConn and SLP-rewrite, I guesss it would be a good idea to review and close most of the related tickets since the traceback and debug output would be really useless now. Yei for smashing tickets!

I hope you all like 2.7.6 when it get released!

Implementing new architecture in msn-prpl

Split SLP modules:

The first thing needed was to move SLP code to where it belongs. 

Every high level calls like requesting a msn transfer, an user display and stuff to the upper layer of the stack (slp.[ch]) this was easy because most of the SLP code was there so the file needed a cleanup.

Every SLP protocol decode and management, like sending acks, an 200OK after the invite and stuff, to the SlpCall module, most of that code was on slp.c and some other on slplink.

Every interaction with link layers, splitting the SlpMessage in Parts in SlpLink module.

Most of this changes were mostly cut-paste changes, still a lot of functions needed to be exported as public so the other modules can use them, it was not so painful.

Get MsnMessage out of here!

Since the code was designed to be used to transfer data using the Switchboard, all the code was populated with MsnMessages which is a representation of the MSG SB command.that is used to send the SlpMessages to the SB server. Since I wanted to get this stack agnostic of link layer it was needed to get the MsnMessage out of the way. It was hard since this object was used as the core of some of the functionality, most of the cases it was replaced by a SlpMessage.

This change was really big because it imply get away every SB code  from the SLP stack and abstract it in some way that can be used any of the link layers.

Msn-prpl Slp Refactor

I have been chosen to refactor the SLP module of the MSN-prpl as my Google Summer of Code work. This module have not been touched since ages, if you read it closely it's clear that it's a hack over a hack with some primitive and old structure mostly lost by the hacks that were added over the years.

As the first part of my work I have somehow re-designed the SLP stack as shown in the SlpArchitecture page, this stack is mostly based on the original structure. I will not elaborate a lot here about the modules because that documentation must be done on the wiki page. ;-) Still I want to explain a little the major changes I did to the original stack.

Msn have different ways to do p2p, libpurple now support both, Switchboard and DirectConnection. The first one is the one that have been always supported where we send the binary data to the Switchboard Server and it redirect it to the buddy client. The recently added DirectConnection support does open a socket on both clients so they can communicate "directly" so the transfer is really faster this way.

To be able to use the same SLP code to manage both types of p2p I have added a Conn layer which aims to abstract the Switchboard(SB) or DirectConn(DC) link. They both manages just the SlpMessageParts and send them outside.

Both SB and DC have some data size restriction, when the binary data that needs to be sent is bigger than the link limit, they must be split in different messages. This is the reason of the creation of the SlpMessageParts which is the fragmented representation of a SlpMessage that can be sent to the link layer down to the stack allowing the upper modules to manage a SlpMessage just as single message without noticing if it's big or small, that is abstracting the need to split messages to the upper layers on the stack.

This is basically why I have done the changes in the architecture, I hope this new architecture will be extensible and easy to maintain.