Dezibel-ḰDE

[Allen Winter]

On Thursday 13 November 2008 11:38:23 am Torsten Rahn wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > Are there KDE apps that will use Decibel in KDE 4.2?
> > We only have a few days before the hard freeze so I don't know that
> > any apps will have the time to use Decibel-kde even if it were in
> > kdenetwork already.
> 
> The motivation to include decibel-kde now is this:
> 
> With the inclusion of Decibel into KDE 4.2 we want to enable and support 
> implementation of new IM clients as well as porting of existing ones to 
> Decibel. Kopete has already chosen Decibel/Telepathy as the way to go and we 
> want to make sure they can start with parts that are fully part of KDE. 
> In addition to Kopete there is a spanish group of university colleagues around 
> aleixpol, which is applying to do a new IM application from scratch using 
> Decibel and fully integrating it to KDE under a free sofware contest that's 
> happening in spain.
> 
> In addition we see activity around a telepathy/qt4 layer and mission
> control, Gnome is still strong with regard to this topic. We want to make sure 
> we have a visible Decibel implementation, because otherwise further telepathy 
> will likely not consider any KDE interests.
> 
> It's important to provide and ship the Decibel-KDE libs support soon. You 
> can't always assume that people will always use trunk to develop with.
> I'd claim that most people who develop against KDE 4 these days try to develop 
> against the stable version of KDE unless there is a really important API 
> enhancement in trunk that they need to depend on (and that they need to be 
> aware of to use it).  This is especially true for applications which are more 
> "specialized" on a topic that doesn't focus on the interaction with the 
> desktop environment itself.
> Shipping the Decibel-KDE libs with KDE 4.2 now would mean that people have a 
> stable release of a tiny library that comes with their distribution and has 
> got a stable release. 
> 
> Just to address possible concerns with regard to compatibility and stability 
> of the interfaces:
> 
> The core of decibel is supposed to stay stable, we rather will see
> extensions than changes.
> The Telepathy/Tapioca part will be changed for KDE 4.3 and will be ported
> to the upcoming Telepathy/Qt4 bindings. We were hoping the layer would be
> ready to port to earlier, but it still will take more time. However, APIs
> are not fundamentally different, so we expect porting changes acceptable.
> Most changes will arise from Qt 4.5's DBUS to be asynchronous in contrast
> to Qt 4.4.
> 
> > Which apps are using/want to use Decibel?
> 
> Except for Kopete and other IM messaging clients there are possible other 
> applications which could use Decibel:  
> 
> * Marble: Plugin for viewing Presence-Information
> * Plasmoid for Presence-Information
> * collaborative Editing using Telepathy-Tubes. Decibel is the central place to 
> start up applications for incoming channels
> * starting/controlling IM from other apps such as addressbook etc.
> 
> Again I'd like to stress that rather providing a  stable library as soon as 
> possible that people can develop against is very important.
> 
> As an example:
> If I would have changed Marble in some way that people would have needed to 
> install trunk in order to develop for Marble I'm pretty sure that Marble 
> wouldn't even have received half of the development that it got during the 
> last half year, as several core developers either just use the stable KDE 4.1 
> version of the libraries or they just use the last stable Qt only version of 
> Marble. Many of these people wouldn't compile trunk as the compilation would 
> cost them the little time they have available for implementing Marble 
> features.
> 
> For the same reasons I'd strongly suggest to ship the decibel-kde lib rather 
> early with a stable KDE release. 
> 
> As pointed out already we'll have several employees at Basyskom available who 
> will be able to fix remaining issues as they are found during their working day 
> during November, December and in January (Currently Dominik Haumann is 
> available for this kind of work). 
>  

Of course you can move decibel-kde into kdereview.
Then please announce it on k-c-d.

Let's see how fast we can get it reviewed.

BTW:  Urs is the kdenetwork module coordinator and he really should
be the person working with you to make this happen.