From time to time I work on Quail which is (or rather was) an instant messaging client based on libpurple using the Qt toolkit.
It has pretty much been abandoned for 9 years and the little bit of work I've put in so far was mostly just fixing some bugs I experienced when testing it. I'd like to continue working on it in the little bit of spare time I have although I don't really have a clear idea where I want to go with this.
In its current state, Quail lacks many features of its big brother Pidgin and is very unstable. Segmentation faults are not uncommon and some widgets don't even show up like they're supposed to.
I personally find the GUI not very convenient to use. I think it inherited the GUI from qpe-gaim which it is based on and which was Gaim running on PDAs. If I were to continue working on Quail I would probably change the GUI to be more like Pidgin's GUI.
So there's actually not that much speaking in favour of continuing to work on Quail. My off work programming time would probably be better spent on starting something new from scratch (but also libpurple based) or contribute more to Pidgin to help bringing version 3 about sooner. The problem with the latter is that working with C and GLib feels more like a chore to me rather than actually being fun. Fixing bugs and reviewing code of Pidgin is fine but I don't see myself contributing new features to it.
On the other hand I already have a name in mind to give to my new IM client, so what's stopping me really? ;)
Top comments (3)
Do what ever brings you joy :)
That's a good point. I think right now it actually would bring me more joy tinkering with Quail rather than starting something new.
Also, the advantage of having something that already works somewhat is not to be dismissed especially if you don't have much time to spend on the project. Say I have an hour every other day to spend on this, it would take "forever" to create something new from scratch that would be on par with what Quail can do now.
Yeah that's kind of where we fell with purple3 and pidgin3. But updating/migrating those to newer api/designs has also been very expensive because you have to come up with transition plans and stuff instead of just breaking stuff and starting over.