making things suck less

So in my last blog about the new MSN plugin that Kopete has, I got some comments about wanting updates on the integration of Kopete and Telepathy, which from the KDE side of things, involves Decibel as well.

The update is that no work has been done to integrate Telepathy in to Kopete. Why? Because we don’t have the people to do the work. (I don’t count the Telepathy plugin that exists, since that’s just POC). For the most part, Kopete sees only some very light maintenance work (bugfixes and such) because we just don’t have the manpower we used to have.

Integrating Telepathy (through the use of Decibel) into Kopete is something that the majority of the team wants to do, but we need more people to help because it’s going to be a massive undertaking with all the various design and coding tasks that will need to be done to make that happen.

Another reason is the barrier to entry is kinda high. One would have to learn about D-Bus, Telepathy, Qt, KDE, Decibel, and Kopete to really get going. If people are interested, the folks on the kopete-devel mailing list and on the #kopete IRC channel will be glad to answer any questions anybody has.

I’ve just imported the new MSN plugin (now called WLM for Windows Live Messenger) into trunk for KDE 4.2. This new plugin provides support for MSNP15 and in general lays the groundwork for way more stuff to be added to Kopete’s MSN plugin. The new plugin uses a library called libmsn which you can get from SourceForge

Thanks go to Tiago Salem Herrmann, Gustavo Boiko, and Roman Jarosz for doing
all the heavy lifting.

Now go install libmsn, update your trunk checkouts, and start testing!

If you were having issues filing bugs for windows related things on bugs.kde.org then you will be glad to know that I just fixed those problems.

Ok, so Dirk surprised us all and upgraded Bugzilla to the new 3.0.5 version. There have been some growing pains associated due to the conversion. There’s more info on dirk’s blog about the reasons behind the quick conversion. All in all though, can’t say that it went too bad.

We’ll be continuing to improve things as the next couple of weeks go by, and you can always file requests on bugs.kde.org.

Over the next few days, I’ll be blogging about some of the additional features that the 3.0.5 version of bugzilla has over the ancient 2.16.1 version we were using, so stay tuned.

• Went to see Hancock today. Enjoyable movie. The Dark Knight is up next. Tons of people waiting in line for the next showing (1.5 hours from when we got to the theater). Completely crazy. I want to see it, but I’ll wait until the theaters are a bit more empty.
• Completely skipped out on the Kopete bugday today. I figured I was going to have to miss one of them, and it was just too busy today for me to make it.
• Started setting up development stuff on the OS X side of the laptop today. Fink has gotten pretty nice since the last time i tried it.
• GTD reboot is the reason for going back to the OS X side of things. A few nice applications there that I need that there aren’t open source (or even Linux-based) replacements for. If I can stay better organized and contribute to KDE more by using OS X rather than Linux, then that’s what I’m doing.

• The first Kopete bugday was a great success. We managed to reduce the number of open Kopete bugs by 68, confirm a few more, and have some fun doing it.
• Just saw Dennis Nienhüser’s visual changelog for Kopete in KDE 4.1 which is totally cool. To be honest, I hadn’t really fired any instant messenger up since my daughter was born and I’d forgotten all those features had been added. Thanks to Dennis for putting that together.
• Still working on the bugzilla update. Dirk found a few more things that I had forgotten to take care of, so I’m working on those and then we’ll see where we stand.

• Some recognition for the bugsquad: in the last month, there have been 140 more bugs closed than bugs opened, and I would guess that at least a little bit of that is due to the work that they’ve been doing on triaging Konqueror bugs.
• Also, thanks to Andreas Pakulat, for going through the KDevelop wishlist bugs and knocking the number of open wishlists down by nearly 150. That’s awesome work!
• The bugsquad will be hosting two! bug triage days for Kopete in the month of July. I’m looking forward to working with the rest of the community those days to get the Kopete bugs triaged a bit more, helping the few developers Kopete has to prioritize their work
• Speaking of Kopete, as with any open source project, it could use some more contributors. Please email kopete-devel@kde.org if you’re interested in helping. Artists, coders, people interested in helping with the web site, bug triagers, all are welcome. Update:For those interested in coding, there is a Junior Jobs page at http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/Kopete/JuniorJobs
• Bugzilla 3 update: I’m working on some data conversions and have the simple-dup-finder.cgi left to port before I think we’re ready to convert. No timeline yet on when that’s going to be done due to my limited time

• blog is back. only managed to lose the last post, since i posted it after i did my backup. oh well. not that important anyways
• so far so good with fedora on this box. quite happy about that. more stuff to get copied over and reinstalled tomorrow

I’m sure some of you will be sad, and a few others very happy, but I don’t really have enough material to do daily blogs anymore. What the dailies did do for me though is to get me into the habit of blogging again, so hopefully I’ll start doing more of that.

• Happy Father’s day to me. It’s my first one.
• Off to the pool in the morning. S. seemed to enjoy the water more this time, most likely cause it was warmer.
• Lunch, naps for the girls. Dad around in the mid-afternoon with (belated) birthday present. My laptop now has a 250GB drive in it, which is (once again), installing Fedora 9. 3 installs in the last week - that needs to quit, or I’ll never get any work done.
• Nice to see the Yzis revival. Guess I need to blow away my svn checkout and learn mercurial now. Although it’s not like i’d have a lot of time for that anyways.