I’m officially a mentor this year for 2013’s Google Summer of Code. I’m a bit late on posting this, but oh well! My student this year is Quentin Headen who is working on a Yahoo! Messenger protocol for the Instantbird chat/ backend (so it’ll also be usable via Thunderbird). You can see an account of his trials, successes and trepidations (RSS) or follow his code repository. He’s made great progress so far and is able to connect, download all the buddies and start private conversations! Not too bad for a few weeks of work! We’ve been keeping a TODO list of things to be supported, please don’t edit it without discussing it with us first.
Our hope is to get this checked into Instantbird by the end of summer and run it in parallel (behind an about:config preference) with the current libpurple Yahoo implementation. Once we’re satisfied that it has feature parity we’ll remove the libpurple version and enable this by default!
Instantbird is also supporting two other projects:
You can find any of us in #instantbird on irc.mozilla.org, my nick is clokep, Quentin’s is qheaden, Nihanth’s: nhnt11, Atul’s: atuljangra, Benedikt goes by Mic and Florian goes by something starting with “flo”.
Thanks also go out to Mozilla for letting us participate in Google Summer of Code with them again! You can see all of the accepted projects in Gerv’s blogpost.