HGKeeper

If you plan to use Pidgin, Finch and libpurple from our Mercurial repository,

PLEASE read this message in its entirety!

Pidgin, Finch, and libpurple are a fast-moving project with a somewhat regular

release schedule. Due to the rate of development, the code in our Mercurial

repository undergoes frequent bursts of massive changes, often leaving behind

brokenness and partial functionality while the responsible developers rewrite

some portion of code or seek to add new features.

What this all boils down to is that the code in our Mercurial repository _WILL_

sometimes be broken. Because of this, we ask that users who are not interested

in personally tracking down bugs and fixing them (without a lot of

assistance from the developers!) use only released versions. Since releases

will be made often, this should not prevent anyone from using the newest,

shiniest features -- but it will prevent users from having to deal with ugly

development bugs that we already know about but haven't gotten around to fixing.

If you are interested in hacking on Pidgin, Finch, and/or libpurple, please

check out the information available at: https://developer.pidgin.im

By far the best documentation, however, is the documented code. You can pass

"--enable-gtk-doc" to ./configure then run "make" in the source tree to

generate pretty documentation in the doc/reference/*/html directories.

Otherwise (or even if you do!), the header files for each subsystem contain

documentation for the functions they contain. For instance, conversation.h

contains documentation for the entire purple_conversation_* API, and account.h

contains documentation for the purple_account_* API.

If you have questions, please feel free to contact the Pidgin, Finch, and

libpurple developers by email at devel@pidgin.im or on IRC at irc.freenode.net

in #pidgin. Please do as much homework as you can before contacting us; the

more you know about your question, the faster and more effectively we can help!

Patches should be posted as Trac tickets at: https://developer.pidgin.im