Re: [Texmacs-dev] Some interesting contributions that volunteers might make

[Nix N. Nix]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 02:30, Jan Ulrich Hasecke wrote:
> Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> > 1) Developing an instant messenging plug-in for TeXmacs.
> >    This could evoluate into a collaborative authoring tool.
> >    This should be easy using the new concept of mutator tags.
> >    See Help -> Interfacing -> Mutator tags for details.
> 
> The only Open Source IM system, I know of, is jabber

How about we go into a different direction.  We could contribute to,
say, gaim, which implements all the popular IM protocols (like Yahoo,
AOL, ICQ, Jabber, MSN), and add the capability of passing the contents
of IMs to various plugins.  Then we could have a checkbox saying "View
as TeXmacs", or we could even parse the message and look for
<TeXmacs|1.0.3.3> in the body of the message, and automatically turn on
viewing via a TeXmacs plugin.

The sequence of events would be one where, upon an incoming message,
gaim walks a list of plugins and "asks" each one whether it knows how to
handle this particular message.  The first plugin that answers gets to
display the message.  The last plugin in the list is the default, plain
text plugin.

An interesting side-effect of working with gaim would be that we would
get to interface TeXmacs to GTK-based apps.  This could be a prelude to
adopting a GTK-based interface for TeXmacs itself.

Now, I know that Jabber also implements all the IM protocols. However,
it does so on the server side, and much less reliably (in my
experience).  In either case, I believe it would be better to work with
an existing IM client, rather than writing our own.  That is, instead of
an IM plugin for TeXmacs, we should make TeXmacs a plugin for an IM
client.  It is difficult for an IM client to gain recognition and wide
adoption, especially since those who would be using it probably already
have an IM client.