[Telepathy] implementation of new XEP's

[Martin Klapetek]

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 4:40 PM, Steven Roose <stevenroose at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ok, I'm a bit confused about the Telepathy structure.
>

> I thought Telepathy was a set of protocol implementation on which GUI's
> like GNOME's Empathy and KDE Telepathy are built.
>

Telepathy is basically just a specification[1] of how an "Instant Messaging
Service" should behave.
It has couple basic parts - Connection Managers, Account Manager, Channel
Dispatcher and Clients.

Connection Managers (CM) are what you think as backends. These implement
the actual network
protocols and all have the same interface. These can be written in about
anything as long
as they keep that interface, which is defined in the specification.

Account Manager is responsible for, well, account management.

Channel Dispatcher is what creates the actual connections to the networks
through CMs and
hands the created channel to Clients, which is Empathy or KDE Telepathy or
others.

The Account Manager and Channel Dispatcher is implemented as "Mission
Control".


> But Qt is a GUI toolkit, so TelepathyQt would be quite the same as KDE
> Telepathy it seems...
>

Qt is a general C++ framework, it's by no means only a GUI toolkit.
TelepathyQt is a library
that makes it easy to actually use the spec in Clients. That's what KDE
Telepathy is; just
a (set of) Client(s) built on top of TelepathyQt.


> Or are you porting all the protocol implementations from FreeDesktop's
> Telepathy as well?
>

Thanks to the architecture of Telepathy, you can take any existing protocol
implementation,
create an "interface glue" in form of CM and it can be used in all
Telepathy Clients. This is
what eg. Telepathy Haze does, it wraps libpurple interface into CM
interface.


> Anyways, it's good to see someone is at least still working on it :) Do
> you have an estimate as to when your changes can appear in KDE Telepathy?
>

After they appear in TelepathyQt, they need to be implemented in KDE
Telepathy (you can
think of KDE Telepathy as "the GUI"). There's not much activity in that
land however so
probably will take some time.

[1] http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/spec

Cheers

-- 
Martin Klapetek | KDE Developer
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