So we decided to go the Telepathy/Tapioca/Decibel way for managing our protocols. Lets explain the weird names:
- Telepathy is a D-Bus interface definition managed by Freedesktop.org and mostly developed by Collabora.uk. It allows a program to communicate via D-Bus to a Connection Manager that supports a given protocol. Think about a local client/server architecture for IM and VoIP.
- Tapioca is an implementation of the Telepathy specification. The Tapioca group has created libraries that help creating clients which speak Telepathy and assisting in creating connection management tools. Currently, we have tapioca-sharp (C#), tapioca-glib (C), tapioca-qt (Qt) and of course, the raw bindings to Telepathy. The tested protocol plugin for Kopete naturally uses tapioca-qt bindings.
- Decibel is the KDE integrator of all these technologies. Decibel will be bundled with Houston, which will manage user preferences and handle connection management. This is the equivalent of Mission Control. Nothing is released yet, but Tobias Hunger is busy working on that :)
The current status is the same as the end of Akademy. I can log in using a Telepathy connection manager. That's all. We can't manipulate the contact list or start a text conversation yet.
In the near future, I will finish the tested Telepathy protocol plugin so that it is usable in real situations (ie. fetch the contact list and able to do text conversation). Also, we will be making our protocol plugin available as a Telepathy Connection Manager. That means you'll be able to use our protocol plugin in any Telepathy client, such as Landell, Tapioca, and soon, in Gossip.
After that, we will start to integrate Telepathy and Decibel into the main code of Kopete. Of course, this work depends on the progress of the projects and components supplying their important code, so we will be following their progress closely.