Retro Protocol Plugins

This repository contains all of the proprietary protocol plugins that were ever included in Gaim/Pidgin.

There are many goals of this repository including being able to use any of them with modern versions of Pidgin 2. We are unlikely to ever port these to Purple 3 but if someone wants to do that, they can feel free assuming they follow the licenses.

Most of these protocols have little if any documentation to how they work. By preserving them in this repository it is much easier for people to study them.

Also there has been a lot of interest in creating clones of old chat networks. Projects like Open OSCAR Server, escargot, and NINA all do this to different extents.

Why now?

Many people have asked us about bringing back our old protocols so that they can use Pidgin on these networks. Initially we rejected this idea as this code hasn't been maintained in years and may potentially have security issues.

However, we realized that if we don't support these protocol plugins others may do so and when people need support they'll most likely look to us. While this should be fine, it could take a while to figure out exactly what's going on, especially if there are multiple versions out there.

To avoid all of this, we decided we would get everything setup in a fashion that is low maintenance for us but makes it easy for people to contribute in a way that everyone can win.

A few things to think about when using the retro protocol plugins

When it comes to the clone networks, the protocols may be the same ones used years ago but these are not the same networks. Your friends from way back when are not on these networks as these are completely separate implementations and your data on the official networks was lost when they shut them down.

Likewise, you are unlikely to be able to hold the operators of these networks accountable unless you personally know them. This means you should be very careful about what you share on these networks as they can see everything that is happening on them including the messages you send.

Discussion

A discussion forum is available on the Instant Messaging Freedom Discourse.

Installing

We are currently in the process of getting builds together but right now only have a handful of packages available.

Windows

You can find the latest installer on the latest releases page. It is named retro-prpl-<VERSION>.exe. Downloading and running this will guide you through the installation process. Note you must already have Pidgin installed.

Arch Linux

Marius Orcsik put together an AUR package.

Everything Else

For everything else you will have to build it yourself.

retro-prpl uses The Meson Build system as a build system.

It is a pretty simple, but before building you're going to need some dependencies.

We do not call out a C compiler to use, but we do test with GCC and Clang.

By default everything will be installed into the expected paths from your libpurple install which can be messy if you're using a system package. You can change this by passing -Duse-purple-prefix=false to meson setup.

There are also options to enable or disable any protocol provided. You can see the full list of these and all other configuration settings by running meson configure in the root of the source directory.

Once you have all your dependencies and options figured out, the build is just like any other Meson project.

meson setup build
cd build
ninja
ninja install

If you have Pidgin or another libpurple client running, you'll need to restart it for the plugins to get loaded.

Footnotes

1. retro-prpl carries an internal version of this which will be used if a system-wide version is not found. ↩

2. This is an optional dependency that will just disable the feature if it is not available. ↩