HGKeeper

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.