[Telepathy] Telepathy 1.0 and moving to Github

[George Kiagiadakis]

Hi all,

There was a discussion on IRC on Friday about our short-term plans. I
will summarize it here for the archive and for anyone else who is
interested in project news.

Telepathy 1.0
=============

After some discussion with ramcq, Kaffeine suggested that we should
proceed with releasing telepathy 1.0 before introducing new features, as
it is easier at this point to merge the 'next' branches that were left
aside a few years ago.

We believe (but haven't fully checked) that all the components that we
are interested in have nearly-finished 'next' branches around, including
KDE-Telepathy, which is the most active client at the moment.

Therefore, the point is valid, so the new plan now is to finish
Telepathy 1.0 as soon as possible and then carry on with a clean spec
and codebase.

Moving to Github
================

Currently we, all the active contributors, work on Github clones of the
telepathy repositories, since it makes the development process quite
easier (among other reasons). Up to now, we used to have a "TelepathyQt"
organization, which included a clone of tp-qt together with the main
repositories of the Qt-based connection managers, while glib-based
component repositories could also be found under my profile.

As you can understand, this situation was a mess, so I proposed that we
move the official upstream on a single Github organization. We all
agreed, but we said to keep the freedesktop repositories as mirrors.

Kaffeine therefore renamed the "TelepathyQt" organization to
"TelepathyIM" ("Telepathy" was already taken) and I have already cloned
there all the important repositories. The move is not complete though
until we setup the mirrors properly (ideally, commits should be
automatically pushed to fdo when we push to github). I will ask the
admins to see what we can do about that.

In any case, please ***consider https://github.com/TelepathyIM to be
upstream from now on***

Note, though, that not all repositories have been moved. I took this as
an opportunity to cleanup the components and "save" only the parts that
make sense.

The following (dead) repositories still remain in fdo:

- telepathy-python (dead; deprecated in favor of gobject-introspection)
- telepathy-butterfly (dead; tp-python based cm for msn, enough said...)
- telepathy-sunshine (dead; tp-python based cm)
- telepathy-farsight (dead; called, telepathy-farstream now)
- telepathy-origami (empty repository)
- telepathy-qt-farstream (empty repository)
- telepathy-qt4 (symbolic link to telepathy-qt)
- telepathy-qt4-yell (dead; used to be a temp repo for Call1 stuff)
- telepathy-yell (dead; same as telepathy-qt4-yell)

And the following also remain in fdo, though they could be saved, but
since our manpower is limited, I have kept them out for now (for less
clutter):

- telepathy-doc (needs a major cleanup; maybe not worth saving, I'm
thinking about starting a new book based on its material)
- telepathy-ring (the ofono CM - not really essential for the desktop
use case; it hasn't been updated since 2011, lacks support for Call1 and
has no 'next' branch... I'm not dealing with it, sorry)
- telepathy-phoenix (non-essential stuff for now; maybe some day...)
- telepathy-ssh-contact (also non-essential stuff for now)

Regarding the development process on github, one difference with the
previous situation is that we are allowed to push personal branches on
the main repositories. In order to keep the branches list tidy, though,
I would recommend prefixing the name of each personal branch with the
username of the developer working on it, so for example a branch can be
called 'gkiagia/myfixes' instead of 'myfixes'. The second difference is
that we can have reviews directly on the commits, plus review requests.

Misc
====

Other topics that were brought up after the github move topic were:

1) Where should we keep tickets? Right now they are also split between
bugzilla and github. No decision has been made yet. Our options seem to
be bugzilla, github and phabricator.freedesktop.org.

-> github: most user friendly, very limited
-> bugzilla: less user friendly, more options, some basic ones are not
available though (they require admin access...); currently cluttered
with old & dead stuff
-> phabricator: even less user friendly (imho), but the most powerful one

2) What about a wiki? The current tp wiki is abandoned and the problem
with it is that you need a freedesktop account to edit it, so it's less
accessible than the repositories or the ticket tracking systems. The
github wiki on the other hand is very limited and goes per repository.


---
George

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