[OTR-dev] Going forward

[Ralf-Philipp Weinmann]

On Dec 17, 2004, at 8:18 PM, Ian Goldberg wrote:

> Welcome to all the new list members!
>
> Here's a little braindump of what I'd like to happen going forward:
>
> One of the really big things is that we need to get OTR working on 
> other
> platforms.  Paul's working on a Windows gaim port, but getting it to
> work on Trillian and iChat is crucial.  Unfortunately, neither of those
> platforms seem to support plugins that can _modify_ (e.g.
> encrypt/decrypt) messages.

Partially true. iChat indeed does not support plugins. This quite is 
unfortunate since most Mac users I know don't bother with alternative 
multi-protocol MacOS X clients such as Fire or Adium X since they then 
lose the voice/video conferencing ability of iChat or need to run 
multiple clients at once.

Trillian however does support plugins, albeit only in the commercial 
pro version. I'd rather concentrate my efforts on the Mirinda IM [1] 
client on the Windows platform (multi-protocol as well, very rich 
feature support, and open-source).

> So what to do?
>
> I think the easiest thing would be to use a little (hopefully mostly
> portable across *nix, Windows, OSX) AIM proxy that does the OTR.
>
> Upsides: portable; quickly get something working on Windows, OSX, and
> non-gaim *nix clients
>
> Downsides: it'd only work for the AIM protocol (we'd need separate
> proxies for different protocols); the "You are Private" UI wouldn't be
> able to be as nicely integrated into the conversation window as it is
> with gaim; configuring your existing client to use the proxy is
> user-unfriendly (install wizards for popular clients?)

Good idea, but the user-unfriendliness of having to manually configure 
a proxy might curb acceptance. I'm not sure whether this can be done 
automatically. A manual giving click-by-click procedures for popular 
clients might help tremendously though.

> For a start, we might look at the code at
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/exclaim/.  I don't know how complete it
> is, but it claims to be an AIM proxy, written with the goal of letting
> plugins play with the data stream.

I sent a quick note to Kevin Cheng the other day. Unfortunately exclaim 
is not actively developed at the moment. The code looks promising but I 
haven't yet tested it.

> For the UI, we should probably use some cross-platform GUI toolkit.

Such as wxWidgets [2].
>
> I'd like someone to step up and claim the lead on this project;
> preferably someone who can test on both iChat and Trillian (other Linux
> clients would be a bonus).
>
> Any takers?
>
>
> [PS: what do people think about putting OTR up on sourceforge?  Is 
> there
> another site that's better?]

Unfortunately the muntions archive [3] seems to be down ATM. 
Sourceforge is ideally suited for active development, although you 
might want to have your source tree hosted somewhere outside of the 
U.S.

Cheers,
Ralf

[1] Miranda Instant Messenger
     http://www.miranda-im.org/

[2] wxWidgets home
     http://www.wxwindows.org/

[3] munitions - cryptographic software for linux
     http://munitions.vipul.net