Meanwhile in Fedora 7

I learned recently that Meanwhile (version 1.0.2) is now in Fedora 7, as is Pidgin, which means that users of Fedora 7 have should have a working Lotus Sametime client in their default install. I wonder if IBM appreciates that at all.

Meanwhile-2.0

The GObject-ification of Meanwhile is slowly progressing. This is a natural progression from the hacked-up class structures I was pretending to have in Meanwhile-1. Replacing the callback triggering style from handler structures to GObject signals seems very healthy. I can also use reference counting and weak references without having to hack together my own broken implementation.

I've re-written the simple reader/writer portions of the code to be a bit more sane, and to also allow for more in-depth error reporting when something unexpected happens unpacking data from a message.

Once Meanwhile-2 is in a functioning state, (with working Python wrappers, at the very least), I'm going to concentrate on the GObject-ification of Pidgin itself, and connecting Pidgin with Meanwhile-2. But that's a long way into the future.

The Meanwhile Project

The Meanwhile Project is an open source implementation of the Virtual Places protocol. This protocol is used most commonly in the corporate communications platform, Lotus Sametime. Meanwhile is the library used by Gaim, Adium, and Kopete to provide Sametime connectivity.

The project was originally hosted on sourceforge.net, but is in the process of moving to code.google.com and google groups. This blog is intended as a replacement for the project news, but will hopefully also become a place to post ideas and information about the project as it progresses.