Archive for June, 2009

pidgin-facebookchat v1.51 important changes

By the time you read this, I’ll have come out with a new version of the pidgin-facebookchat plugin. There are some significant changes that downstream packagers will want to pay attention to.

The main one you’ll bump into, is that the plugin now uses the json-glib library. It’s included in svn if you don’t want to compile it yourself, but it’ll be good to make a package for your distro to include it, since not all distro’s have it. From now, we’ll be moving over the string-parsing code to use the new json-glib stuff. The buddy list has been the first thing ported over, and by the next version we’ll have moved all the code over to using it.

The other important change is that the plugin can use zlib for requesting compressed data from the Facebook servers. gzip content encoding is nothing new, but it was a P.I.T.A. to code up in C. To enable it, you’ll need to use the -DHAVE_ZLIB compiler flag. I’ve found that the data savings are around 75%, so you’ll make your fellow distro-users happy by enabling it.

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