On Tuesday 06 January 2009, Anders Olofsson wrote: > I've looked around a bit for library implementations of ICQ and MSN > protocol and I didn't find much. It seems most other IM clients have > there own implementations for these protocols. The main exception is > libpurple but there's not much documentation so I'm not sure how much it > does, but it looks like it contains more that just the protocol > implementation so if we use it we'll probably end up loosing more of our > daemon. However it seems libpurple compiles to make a separate sub > library for each protocol. If these have a standard interface, we could > get support for all those protocols with just one api. (If someone knows > more about libpurple, please correct me or fill in.) > > We could of course make a library ourselves in the hope that other > (future) applications will also use it and help maintain it. However I > think for this to happen we will have to have a good implementation > that's up to date. Also if we're not careful we might end up with a > library interface that isn't usable for anything but Licq. > > Another way would be to find another IM client to cooperate with and > make a library together. This way we could take the best parts from both > sides and then maintain it together. For MSN I guess it would mostly be > a matter of convincing another project to move their code to a library. > I don't have my hopes very high on this though since it would be asking > another group to do a lot of work that will (in the short term) mostly > be only for our benefit.
Some of the other clients are either being rebased on or getting support for protocol implementations provided through Telepathy [1] services. > However, since Qt4 has a bit more desktop handling functions than Qt3 we > actually have most of the Kde3-gui features in the Qt4-Gui without > compiling it for Kde. What we're missing (that I know of) is spell > checking and integration with the kde address book. I would like to see > a non-kde spell checker it Qt4-Gui, I can live without the address book > sync and then the difference will just a matter of using kde widgets to > get the kde look and feel. At the Qt Dev Days 2008 Qt Software (formerly Trolltech) indicated that they would increase work on platform integration, i.e. detecting which environment they are running in and dynamically loading specific backend implementations for certains aspects, e.g. dialogs. So the need to a KDE GUI variant will probably become less relevant as Qt progresses on that mission. Additionally quite some KDE features are actually provided by desktop session services and KDE Libs only provide convenience API for accessing them, i.e. a Qt-only GUI could potentially still access the same features through the services' D-Bus APIs. As for spellchecking: KDE's spell checking API is mainly an abstraction over the handful of spell checking libraries, i.e. using one of them as a hard dependency might be viable instead. Cheers, Kevin [1] http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/ -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring
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