KDE + Telepathy Sprint: it’s a wrap-up

Hi everyone, long time no post.

As you probably might already know, the Telepathy-KDE sprint in Collabora‘s offices just ended. It was great to meet most, if not every, of the people working on Telepathy in KDE, and it has been an immensely productive sprint, where lots was achieved. I won’t stress the points Daniele and George already stated, and you are probably tired of reading, but I will try to give a better insight of what I’ve been working on.

Telepathy-Qt4 goes CMake

The main target of my work in the sprint has been the library which is the foundation of our project: Telepathy-Qt4. At last, with the joy of everyone involved, my branch which switched the buildsystem of the library from autotools to CMake has been merged to master by yours truly. So yes, from next version on, Telepathy-Qt4 will use CMake as its buildsystem. The switch was mostly motivated by more maintainability in the long run, better portability, and (significantly) improved compilation time. Of course, all of the features of the previous buildsystem have been ported, and even some new ones have been added in the process.

I can honestly say this has been an immensly tiring work, since Telepathy-Qt4’s buildsystem is far from trivial, and is able to expose some weaknesses in both buildsystems. For sure, I can consider myself a "real" CMake guru after this port 🙂

Stream tubes are coming

Of course, meeting Andre and Olli in person made easier the review of the high-level Stream Tubes support in Telepathy-Qt4. The branch has been reviewed extensively and it’s now in the final review stages: hopefully it will be merged soon as well.

Tests for Telepathy-KDE

I also finally put to an end the everlasting limbo of Telepathy-KDE unit tests: George did a great job in porting my Telepathy-Qt4 branch to Telepathy-KDE and creating a new test library, but he was waiting for me to integrate the remaining GLib bits for generating fake connection managers. I did that, and finally ported and committed my old autotests for telepathy-integration-daemon, which instantly spotted a pair of bugs which have indeed been fixed right after 🙂

UI Design – ’cause we like to be cool

A very strong accent has been given to UI design: me, Andre, Will, David and Sebastian set up a team for designing and reviewing the various UI the new Telepathy components would have. It required quite a lot of time, but I’m very satisfied with the final outcome, just like everyone else. Andre has also designed a mockup in QML, which has been plugged into the contactlist model straight away the day after. So you can expect a lot of UI coolness coming!

That’s all, folks

I guess that covers most of what we did: not bad for 2 and a half days of hacking 🙂 Of course, this is just the beginning: everything is starting to take shape, and you can expect some very, very cool stuff coming to your desktop… soon!

~ by Dario on 23 September, 2010.