Dezibel-ḰDE

[Matt Rogers]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 10:45:24PM +0000, George Goldberg wrote:
> 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

And keeping the entire release team in the loop rather than sending emails to just
one member of the release team would also be appreciated.
--
Matt