Hell Oh Entropy!

There have been a number of code changes in libyahoo2 since some time now, with Gennady Feldman and later me pitching in. So it was finally time to do a release. My primary motivation for this was to remove libyahoo2 code base from ayttm and have it link dynamically to libyahoo2. I hope Ray van Dolson packages libyahoo2 for Fedora soon, so that I can pester Minto to package ayttm with that patch too.

The YMSG16 support changes in 1.0.0 will break things for many people using libyahoo2, but that was necessary. I wanted to avoid tying libyahoo2 to a specific crypto library for SSL use and also reduce the overhead of maintaining that code base. The result of this change is that it removed all of the networking code from libyahoo2 as well, which reduced maintenance overhead even more.

Another big change was the removal of the ability to bypass the callback struct and link functions directly. It would make things difficult when you're trying to find out in your configure script if the library is installed. One would have to write a test program in the autoconf, which would have to have all the callbacks implemented, to be able to compile successfully. That is painful. Also, The approach is much more extensible compared to earlier the approach.

There are a number of things that we still need to get done in libyahoo2:

• Chat room support
• Webcam support— I am not sure if it is broken since I don't have a webcam to test, but I want to make sure anyway
• Are mail notifications working?
• Voice support

I will be submitting a Fedora Summer Coding idea for libyahoo2 soon to add chat room support as a mentor. The major skills required for this would be C and the ability to read and understand wireshark dumps.