Convey was created out of the need to build [Pidgin](https://pidgin.im) and its

supporting libraries on multiple Linux distributions, Windows and MacOS. While

there are many continuous integration tools out there, all of them still

require maintenance and can only be used by the project itself.

This becomes a problem when you have a community of plugin developers who would

also like to build against all of its supported operating systems but can't and

shouldn't need to put forth the effort and maintenance involved with using

other available tools.

This is where Convey's concept of [build containers](concepts.md)

comes into use. Once you have all the dependencies required to build something,

like a Pidgin plugin, you are then able to share that container image with

everyone using this system and they are then able to use that image to build

against. So a project like Pidgin can supply build images containing the most

recent releases with all of the build dependencies for multiple platforms and

then plugin developers can use that image to test their plugins against.