[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Chat Functionality with Jabber

[Mike Kaufman <kaufman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 02:03:05PM -0400, Adam Theo wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> As soon as I realize I'm playing alot of FreeCiv, and then sign up to 
> the developers list to see what I can do to help out in my spare time, 
> my spare time disappears... I swear, there's some natural law that could 
> be explained in a mathematical equation about this.
> 
> Anyways, I figure I can at least try to bring in one of my other hobbies 
> to this project. Could anyone tell me about the chat functionality 
> between players in FreeCiv? I assume it is a plaintext-based protocol 
> that was home-grown to serve this need? I was told there are no docs on 
> it, but was hoping an expert on the matter could tell me about it.

the code responsible is found in server/handchat.c
the client's code is found in client/gui-*/chatline.c

The message from a client is sent as a simple string: (from the gtk client)

 theinput = gtk_entry_get_text(GTK_ENTRY(w));

  if (*theinput) {
    mystrlcpy(apacket.message, theinput, MAX_LEN_MSG-MAX_LEN_USERNAME+1);
    send_packet_generic_message(&aconnection, PACKET_CHAT_MSG, &apacket);

the server does all the parsing.

Is Jabber GPLed?

What sort of needed or desired functionality do you believe that jabber 
could bring that our current mechanism doesn't offer?

even if jabber doesn't take off here, please stick around. pretty soon
here, I'm going to make a big push for updated documentation.
see http://www.freeciv.org/manual/ for the sorry state of affairs :)

-mike