README.SVN

If you plan to use gaim SVN, PLEASE read this message in its entirety!

Gaim is a fast-moving project with a somewhat regular release schedule.
Due to the rate of gaim development, SVN 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 SVN _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!) avoid SVN and use releases.  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 gaim, please read README and
HACKING, and take note of the issues in PROGRAMMING_NOTES.  (Note that
they may be somewhat out of date at times.) Win32 developers, please
read README.mingw.

By far the best documentation, however, is the documented code.  Not
all parts of gaim have yet been documented, but the major subsystems
are falling fast.  If you have doxygen, you can use the Doxyfile 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
gaim_conversation_* API, and account.h contains documentation for the
gaim_account_* API.

If you have questions, please feel free to contact the gaim developers
by email at gaim-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, on IRC at
irc.freenode.net in #gaim, or via the sourceforge forums at
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/gaim.  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 you!

Send patches to gaim-devel@lists.sourceforge.net or post them in the
Sourceforge forums at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/gaim.