Decibel Status update
With so many rumours about the Decibel realtime communication framework floating around the dot I need to get over my blogging-lazyness and finally write a short summary about the status of Decibel.
It ain’t dead.
It seems some of the naysayers were watching branches/work/decibel, which indeed is dead since the project was moved into the playground. I did blog about that move, but I should probably have properly announced that move (even though I am still a bit unsure where exactly). So we were moving, even though we were doing so below the radar:-)
But even there it was going a slower than it used to be. This is in part due to constraints on the amount of time I can spend on the project. Another factor is that nobody has asked me for fixes nor improvements, so I just assumed all is perfect;-) So send in some feature requests to speed up development. But even without requests there are some cool things happening!
What has happened?
George Goldberg has stepped forward and send in patches that integrate the Decibel daemon with KWallet. So you can now store your account settings there, together with your other online identity data. Allen Winter has provided some fixes to our build system. These were necessary to bring Decibel into shape for KDE review process.
What is in the works?
George is continuing his KDE4 integration work. I am currently working on a system to automatically generate Qt wrappers for the Telepathy specification. This will get us all the new goodies from there (once the more high level Tapioca library is updated). Allen has moved the code into the KDE review area and it is now getting reviewed (I think;-).
Please track the code in trunk/kdereview/decibel. The move is not yet official and thus was not yet announced, but this is where all the new code will end up. playground/kdepim/decibel will get removed as soon as possible. Allen is guiding me through the review process, so I am sure that we will closely follow the standard procedures this time;-)
February 15th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Thanks for the update but isn’t tapioca dead? That’s what a gnome empathy dev told me plus last commit on their svn is very old too.
February 15th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
The tapioca people are actively trying to help out, so I do not consider the project dead.
Even if they suddenly decided not to support us anymore we could always use telepathy-qt directly. This would require moving some code into decibel that currently is housed in tapioca, but that is what free software is there for