Xavier Claessens

Question about GIT and SVN

Empathy is hosted on svn.gnome.org but I prefer using GIT for the development. In fact only translators are still using SVN, all regular empathy contributors have git branches that I can easily merge. I initially created the git repository using git-svn, then I cloned my repository on a public server so everybody can get a git clone of empathy. Other developers cloned that public repository that I keep in sync with SVN trunk.

I branched to keep 0.22.x stable and continue dev on 0.23.x. I created the gnome-2-22 branch on SVN but I don’t know how to use it with git. I would like to have that branch in my git repository and being able to cherry-pick patches from master to the gnome-2-22 branch. How can I do that? How does other GNOME maintainers that uses GIT?

You can see here how I work with git for empathy.

Audio and Video in Empathy

I released Empathy 0.22.1 yesterday and I enabled VoIP support by default! It works pretty well with latest stream-engine (0.5.0). Audio should work with SIP. Audio/Video should work with jabber and compatible with google talk.

Google Summer of Code

We currently have 3 students for the Google Summer of Code 2008. They proposed 3 really interesting tasks:
1) Create a dedicated program for named chatrooms (IRC and Jabber) looking like xchat-gnome.
2) Improve webcam support. Porting empathy to the future libstream-engine using farsight2. Integrate with cheese for effects and things like taking a photo and use it as avatar. Etc…
3) Improve chat themes by plugins. Add optional use of webkit to display adium themes.

Edit: GSoC projects are not yet accepted, those are only proposed tasks for now.

GNOME 2.22.0 tarball due is today so everyone is releasing! I released Empathy 0.22.0, that’s the version that would be 2.22.0 if it was accepted in the GNOME desktop. I branched for GNOME 2.22 so work continue in HEAD to make 2.24 rock solid.

It is time to think  about Google Summer of Code, last year empathy had 2 succesfull projects: Adding filetransfer (work still need to be reviewed) and audio/video (merged but not activated by default yet). For 2008 I have cooked a quick list of possible works, if someone is interested by one of those please contact me.

• Move chatroom UI to a dedicated program looking like xchat-gnome.
• Implement file transfer spec in all known Connection Managers.
• Finish porting empathy to telepathy-glib to drop libtelepathy dep.
• Write user and API documentation for empathy.
• Improve call UI, make possible to embed it in chat window, etc. Move to libstream-engine or whatever will replace s-e’s DBus API.
• Meta-contacts
• import info in empathy from other clients like pidgin (logs, accounts, etc).
• Design a personal smileys interface and implement it in telepathy-butterfly and empathy.
• Design a xhtml-im interface and implement it in all CM and empathy.
• Make use of constructors in all objects instead of having code in empathy_*_new().
• Porting telepathy stack to Windows/OSX.
• Write unit tests and make sure empathy don’t have leaks using valgrind. Move current tests to GTest.
• Make a plugin system for chat themes, demonstrate with a theme supporting LaTeX math equations.
• Implement contact info in all known CM and empathy

Yet another empathy release! As empathy is not yet part of GNOME desktop I’m not following freezes, so this version has news features ;D

The VoIP support in empathy is now far better, but you’ll need not-yet-released versions of farsight and stream-engine which fixes lots of issues, we should get new releases of those modules rsn.

Empathy has now decent UI for configure Jabber/GTalk/Yahoo/ICQ/IRC/MSN protocols, I refactorised the code to generate those specialised UI and it’s now just a matter of a glade file with 15lines of C… So if you’re using another protocol (thanks to telepathy-haze empathy supprots all piding protocols)  and want to give a try using empathy, I would be happy to get patches!

For those of you wanting to contribute using git, please read the “commit message” topic on my git howto.

See announce for more details, as usual help is welcome! I set up a page explaining how to contribute using GIT because gnome’s svn is really… hm… I stop here to not start a flame.

Monday was not a good day to release telepathy packages: Empathy 0.21.5 and 0.21.5.1 got released with FTBFS, MissionControl 4.53 and 4.54 got released but was unable to start, pymsn 0.3.0 and telepathy-butterfly 0.3.0 got released and bugs were discovered directly…

So we now have Empathy 0.21.5.2, telepathy-mission-control 4.55, pymsn 0.3.1 and telepathy-butterfly 0.3.1 ready and hopefully not too much buggy.

I proposed Empathy for inclusion into GNOME desktop 2.22 but it got rejected for various good reasons, mainly because it’s still a young and instable project and needs more polish. So if you like empathy and want a good IM client for GNOME 2.24 your help is needed to improve it.

pymsn and telepathy-butterfly 0.3.x are  a complete rewrite to support MSNP15, Empathy is the first free client supporting MSN protocol version 15 thanks to Ali Sabil and all pymsn/butterfly contributors. Work will continue to support more features like file transfer, audio/video, custom smileys, nudges, etc. If you like python language and want a better MSN support for telepathy clients you can help pymsn and telepathy-butterfly projects.

See the announce.

Please don’t report bugs on your blog, we have bugzilla.gnome.org for that. Comments are disabled and I see no email address so I have to post on my blog to reply…

To reply to the problem: I don’t think it’s an Empathy bug, empathy gives UTF-8 messages to the Connection-Manager, if the protocol don’t want to send UTF-8 messages it’s up to the CM to change the format. So which CM and protocol were you using?

Thanks

Edit: Ah, I just seen the bug is now in bugzilla too. Bug #503200. Sorry for the noise.

Empathy 0.21.3 released in time for GNOME 2.21.3 tarball due.

For those who want to contribute to Empathy and, like me, prefer using git, we have a git repository at git.collabora.co.uk. I keep it sync with GNOME’s SVN using git-svn, it works pretty well.

In time for GNOME 2.21.2, here is Empathy 0.21.2. See announce and, as usual, feel free to test, report bugs and propose patches