HACKING

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://pidgin.im/development/.

By far the best documentation, however, is the documented code.  If you have
doxygen, you can run "make docs" in the toplevel directory to generate pretty
documentation.  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.libera.chat
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!

For submitting patches please check out
https://docs.pidgin.im/libpurple/latest/chapter-using-mercurial.html as well as
https://docs.pidgin.im/libpurple/latest/chapter-code-contributions.html.