Re: Dezibel-ḰDE

[George Goldberg]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 7:56 PM, Allen Winter <winter at kde.org> wrote:
> 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.
>>

Can you please clarify exactly which subdirectories/parts of the
playground/network/decibel-kde svn directory you would like to include
in KDE 4.2.

George Goldberg