support of bonjour/zeroconf chat
Since the mac os X version 10.4, ichat can discover other client on the local net thank to mdns/sd ( the discovery part of zeroconf/bonjour/rendez vous technology ), add them to a special roster, and then use jabber to communicate with them.
Would it be possible to add the same feature, compatible with ichat/miranda/gaim to gajim ?
This would enable to quickly chat with other people on the same network, without having to setup a jabber server, or without needing a access to the internet ( for a external jabber server ). This is useful for a home network, but also at conference, etc.
Since avahi ( http://freedesktop.org/Software/Avahi ) provides a mdns implementation, and offer native python bindings, I think this would be quite easy to add the same feature to gajim, without losing the focus on jabber protocol. The problem is that avahi is only availiable on linux/*bsd/osX, but as is dbus, so I guess this is not a big problem.
As this use mostly standard protocol ( jabber, mdns/sd are all internet standards ), this would not requires any reverse engineering. The dns/sd record is documented by a miranda developer, as is the small modification to jabber done by ichat when used in this mode.
Miranda and gaim ( among other) already support this, there was some discussion regarding psi ( http://psi-im.org/wiki/Bonjour ) , and there is a page with explanation made by a miranda developer ( http://xurble.org/weblog/2005/08/bonjour-ichats-use-of-xmpp-jabber.html ).
There is also the code of gaim ( http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/gaim/gaim/src/protocols/bonjour/ ), and maybe some informations on a similar bug opened for kopete ( http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93177 ).