Mission Statement:

	The IRC Helper plugin exists to enhance IRC support in Pidgin in ways
	which are inappropriate for general inclusion in Pidgin.

Enhancing IRC support in Pidgin involves two specific areas:

	First, wrapping IRC services and other protocol oddities so that from
	the user's perspective, IRC reacts the same as the other protocols in
	Pidgin.  The most obvious example is with NickServ.  For most
	protocols, you set a password and Pidgin authenticates you and you're
	done.  With IRC, you have to manually authenticate to NickServ (or
	setup a Buddy Pounce).  By handling the NickServ authentication, this
	plugin enhances the users's experience by providing consistency with
	other protocols (as well as the obvious automation by saving the
	NickServ password).

	Second,this plugin should offer novel new features.  See the IDEAS file
	for examples.

Most of the existing code in this plugin is specific to popular IRC servers.
If this code was in Pidgin, users would expect it to work everywhere, which it
won't.  The inconsitent behavior would result in a lot of complaints to the
Pidgin team.

Also, if the servers ever changed their responses (even by a single character),
things would break.  Pidgin needs to be more stable than that.  IRC is a
(mostly) documented protocol.  While it has its quirks, IRC is fairly
standardized and unchanging.  On the other hand, IRC services and the like are
not standardized and can change without notice.  Pidgin can focus on the
standard protocol and this plugin will focus on the non-standard services, etc.