Birb

A library of utilities for GLib based applications.

History

With the development of Pidgin 3 we've been trying to modularize and create libraries that others are able to use as well. That also means that we didn't have an easy way to reuse things between libraries.

We could make the libraries depend on each other, but that doesn't work in the case where we would implement it in libpurple as those dependencies are needed in libpurple or Pidgin and thus we have a circular dependency. Not only that, but pulling in libpurple for a single class/API/whatever would bring in a lot of unnecessary stuff.

So to simplify this dependency issue we decided to create yet another library that would just have these pieces that we wanted to reuse. For example, birb has adopted PurpleQueuedOutputStream which is a GOutputStream subclass that manages a queue of output so you can't write as often as you like.

This was something we wanted to use in our new external XMPP library Xeme that is the basis for our new implementation in libpurple. Since it wouldn't make sense to have an external library depend on libpurple for PurpleQueuedOutputStream we pulled it out and put it here in Birb where it can be used much more easily.

Plans

As previously mentioned we've already pulled in PurpleQueuedOutputStream as BirbQueuedOutputStream but we do have more than just this planned.

There are a few things we want/need to build that need a verb based command line parser. While you can technically do this with GOptionContext, there's a number of things you'd have to do to make that happen. Since we need this in multiple libraries, we plan on implementing it here in Birb.

It would also be useful to us if we could parse a GMenu in GtkBuilder XML format into a GMenu without using GtkBuilder due to the core/ui split nature of libpurple. As such we would like to implement that here as well.

We're also looking at creating an object that can be used to populate a GMenu via signals that would also gather GActionGroup's and their prefixes.

Last but not least, we need a simple implementation of StringPrep and precis for a number of things. So we'd like to add at least a basic parser in here to eliminate duplication across the libraries.

Building

Birb uses meson as a build system. So the steps to build are the same as any other project using meson:

meson setup build
meson compile -C build
meson test --verbose -C build

Contributing

If you would like to contribute, please see our Contributing Guide.

API Reference