[Telepathy] current Telepathy progress

[Robert McQueen]

NAVEEN VERMA wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> I have also join the Telepathy project. but I am not able to understand,
> what I should do or which direction I should move, Could anyone guide me
> to the right way.
>  
>  
> Thanks & Regards
> --Naveen

A good point.. things have been a little quiet on the mailing list
front, but believe me it's not because we're not busy. We should try and
find some time soon to do some releases and make it a little easier for
people to download and try out our stuff, but at the moment development
is focussed in the darcs repositories at:
 http://projects.collabora.co.uk/darcs/telepathy/

If anyone knows how to set up a sensible system to report darcs pushes
to mailing lists and IRC channels, let me know! :)

At the moment our development is focussed on the telepathy-gabble
backend, which is our XMPP connection manager, including plenty of bug
fixing and tweaking to ensure good interoperability with existing Jabber
servers as well as Google Talk, including our MUC and voice call
functionality.

I'm currently working on changes to make Gabble compliant to
specification version 0.13.x, which can be found in the telepathy-python
tree (to produce a spec.html: cd doc; PYTHONPATH=.. make). I will
publish the spec changelog shortly.

Other work in progress includes registering to Jabber servers and
implementing some of the Jingle JEPs instead of our current
Google-specific voice call signalling, and in the near future we're
going to be speccing and working on file transfers and looking at Jingle
video calling with help from Philippe Kalaf and Rob Taylor hacking on
the Farsight library and the required Gstreamer support.

Raphaël Slinckx has been working on Cohoba (in the telepathy-gnome
tree), a set of Python processes which implement the different parts of
an idealised Telepathy deployment, including a start of day / presence
applet which also temporarily serves the job of mission control,
launching seperate handlers for handle contacts, voice calls and text chats.

Adam Lofts has been working on a seperate (arguably more conventional
:D) chat UI in C#, which can be seen at
http://adam.uwcs.co.uk/telepathy.png.

Other work on the horizon includes getting started on speccing and
implementing a cross-desktop Mission Control component, which basysKom
has expressed interest in, and brushing up our telepathy-sip backend,
which the sofia-sip guys are having a go at.

As I mentioned in my blog post
(http://www.robot101.net/2006/04/19/summer-of-telepathy/) and on the
GNOME summer of code ideas page, we're currently looking for lots more
components:

    * New protocol backends such as MSN, AIM, IRC, etc. Or even a
gnome-phone-manager based SMS backend.
    * File transfer support in Nautilus.
    * A Telepathy backend for Gossip to make use of connection managers
for chatting any protocol.
    * Displaying presence/capabilities within Evolution or Contacts
(using Galago) and requesting chats/calls with people.
    * Representing existing IM-based extensions within Telepathy to
render them protocol independent, such as Gobby's collaborative editing
or gShrooms shared music.

Some other ideas would be to clean up the telepathy-python tree so that
the spec definitions live seperately from the base classes for
implementing connection managers, and possibly working on some Twisted
Words-based connection managers.

On top of all the coding going on and to be done, we're in desperate
need of some better documentation about how to achieve things using the
framework. The specification doesn't really give you enough to go on to
explain how to start doing <foo>, or what should be expected when <bar>
event takes place.

Regards,
Rob