Kopete and Telepathy
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.
November 20th, 2008 - 15:20
I’m interested in developing a Telepathy CM that uses libmsn, but directly.
Is anybody else interested?
November 20th, 2008 - 21:17
I’m interested too, I really want to see a big change in kopete.
I’m fairly new to Qt programming though but I’ll be glad to help with the junior jobs in kopete.
November 21st, 2008 - 04:31
Matt:
In an effort to perhaps lower the entry barrier here, perhaps a detailed TechBase page is in order?
I’ve found that though Techbase is an excellent platform, a lot of developers don’t leverage it as much as they could; probably because of a lack of time. But once integrated into one’s workflow, it’s really good for keeping organized and letting people outside the project easily connect with developers.
I imagine if you start off a few basic pages about the necessary components of telepathy support, and an “overview” type page that outlines and brainstorms how to best put them together, then interested parties will probably start experimenting a little and adding more detailed information to the wiki. Provided that enough traffic is driven there, of course, which I suppose could be done in a blog post, the dot, the new forum, etc.
November 22nd, 2008 - 09:43
I agree with mm, info in TechBase would be a great idea.
November 23rd, 2008 - 16:05
No, I think it’s wrong.
“One would have to learn about D-Bus, Telepathy, Qt, KDE, Decibel, and Kopete to really get going” is false: the main purpose of telepathy would be to
split this efforts, theoretically one should work on kopete/KDE/Qt/Decibel , someone else just on Decibel/Telepathy , and some other on Telepathy+individual protocols.
November 25th, 2008 - 10:35
Will Kopete in 4.2 have the IRC plug-in back?
November 29th, 2008 - 16:37
Well I already started to create a telepathy CM for my libmsn-pecan, now I’m thinking on writing C bindings for libmsn, and actually the same C API can be shared by the two code-bases.
That means libmsn could also have a libpurple plug-in. In fact it’s already connecting and trying to login on both Empathy and Pidgin.
For more details look here:
http://felipec.wordpress.com/2008/11/29/msn-pecan-0017-the-beginning-of-a-new-era/
June 25th, 2009 - 16:49
http://share.skype.com/sites/linux/2009/01/skype_for_linux_updates.html
I use both Kopete with various protocols and Skype. I’d like to ditch Skype– it’s proprietary and Linux development sucks. The alternative at the moment? Ekiga looks pretty good, but it’s GTK. Empathy seems a step in the right direction– same problem. I would love to see Kopete/Decibel step up for the KDE side of things.
I’m not a programmer so I can’t help with development. I just got my BA and am currently unemployed, but I would be very willing to donate to the project– small time now, and more so in the future.