README

# Purple, Pidgin and Finch
See AUTHORS and COPYRIGHT for the list of contributors.

libpurple is a library intended to be used by programmers seeking
to write an IM client that connects to many IM networks.  It supports
AIM, ICQ, and XMPP, among others.

Pidgin is a graphical IM client written in C which uses the GTK+
toolkit.

Finch is a text-based IM client written in C which uses the ncurses
toolkit.

These programs are not endorsed by, nor affiliated with, AOL nor any
other company in any way.

## BUILD

Pidgin uses [meson](https://mesonbuild.com) as a build system.

You can quickly build Pidgin with the following commands

    meson build
    cd build
    ninja
    sudo ninja install

There are quite a few options for the build that you can view by looking at `meson_options.txt`.  You can specify the options when running meson like the following:

    meson -Ddebug=true build

If you've already ran meson you can use `meson configure`

    cd build
    meson configure -Ddebug=true

## RUN

Currently Pidgin can not be run from a build directory which means you must
install it first.  Once you've done that, you only need to run 'pidgin' or
'finch'.

To get started, simply add a new account.

If you come across a bug, please report it at: https://developer.pidgin.im/

## PLUGINS

If you do not wish to enable the plugin support within Purple, run meson with
`-Dplugins=false` or if you've already ran meson use
`meson configure -Dplugins=false` from the build directory.  This will prevent
the ability to load plugins.

`ninja install` puts the plugins in `$PREFIX/lib/purple` (PREFIX being what
you specified when you ran meson.  It defaults to `/usr/local`). Purple
looks for the plugins in that directory by default.  Plugins can be installed
per-user in `~/.purple/plugins` as well.  Pidgin and Finch also look in
`$PREFIX/lib/pidgin` and `$PREFIX/lib/finch` for UI-specific, respectively.

## Developing

There is a ton of information on developing Pidgin available at
[developer.pidgin.im](https://developer.pidgin.im).

To generate the documentation locally you can pass `-Ddoc=true` to `meson` or
`meson configure` which will build the `gtk-docs` for everything.