Microsoft Office Communicator is an instant messaging client that integrates into the Exchange Messaging Server (the protocol behind it is an extended version of SIP/SIMPLE). Anyway, there’s a libpurple (i.e. the backend of Instantbird and Pidgin) protocol plug-in for OCS (Office Communicator Server) called SIPE. (It’s also striving for a generic library to connect to OCS, but that’s not quite there yet.)
I’ve been interested in getting this to compile in the Instantbird framework for a while now, adding a new protocol to Instantbird. First of course I need the SIPE source, I chose to grab a release source bundle instead of using the git repository, just for ease moving files around, etc. There’s a rather vague Windows build page on the wiki that I started with, says I need:
So great, we have most of the dependencies! We just need one more. So I go grab, gmime from the GNOME website (2.5.7, which is the newest stable, currently), again as a source bundle and put the necessary files in purple/libraries/gmime and edit the makefile so it will (attempt) to compile. But great — it requires libiconv, which apparently is very difficult to compile, especially on Windows. Luckily for me there’s a Windows version (not a port, but one that uses the native Win32 APIs with the same interface): win-iconv. This compiled like a champ when added as purple/libraries/iconv.
Unfortunately when I went back to compiling gmime, it attempts to access parts of glib we’re not using (gio, in particular) and thus is not in our source code. I can grab the glib source (2.28.6 to match, of course) and add the gio subfolder, but first we should check if this part of gmime is even used by SIPE! (My guess is that it is not, but that’s where I’m at now. I’ll post back when I get further.