xchat backend

[Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com>]

Apologies for the hope-packed subject, I am not announcing any xchat 
backend :)

But I did start thinking about the backend. The log files are very similar to 
Konversation files, so the Konversation code can be easily adapted to make it 
an xchat backend.

There are two problems, and major ones. xchat stores the timestamps in the log 
files in user-configurable way, using strftime format. Changing the strftime 
format to a .Net DateTime format is one obstacle.

The second one is worse. The default format (and for any user that stores the 
timestamps in this way) only contains the time (no date). The Konversation 
backend and other IM backends rely on time-date to index the chat lines 
according to the timeline. One option is to refuse to index log files which 
dont mention the full date too ... but that will be too harse. The other 
option, ... don't know.

Those are pretty much the problems with implementing an xchat backend right 
now. I know there is some demand for an xchat backend, so I thought to share 
with you my findings. Anyone is welcome to look into the issues. Either 
discuss here or at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=487867

- dBera

PS: In other news, svn trunk now has a backend for the IM client Empathy. It 
will be shipped soon with 0.3.2.

-- 
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Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE fan
Mandriva / Inspiron-1100 user