KTp/Developers

Welcome to the
KDE Telepathy Development Wiki

Current Version: 23.07.70

KDE Telepathy

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Updated Feb 22, 2024

Introduction

Real-time communication has traditionally been a detached feature of desktop computing, provided via standalone instant messaging clients with poor integration into the desktop experience. One of the primary goals of the KDE 4 series is to tighten integration between different components of the environment. The KDE Telepathy (hereafter "KTp") project aims to tackle just this.

Our aims are:

To integrate real-time communication deeply into the KDE workspaces and applications
To provide an infrastructure to aid development of collaborative features for KDE applications.

If you find these goals appealing, why not consider getting involved? C++ programming is not a requirement.

Technical information

The RTCC project uses the cross-desktop Telepathy Framework as the basis for our work.
We should try and reuse code from Kopete and other existing code wherever possible. However, this should be balanced with the need to refactor/rewrite where appropriate, to keep the new code true to Telepathy idioms.

Frequently asked questions

You can find a list of answers to frequently asked questions here: FAQ.

The plan

Build components equivalent to a traditional IM application, using Kopete code as much as possible, and integrating with other pillars of KDE, where appropriate.
Add advanced Telepathy features such as voice/video.
Build components and convenience classes to enable real-time communication and collaboration features in any KDE SC app that wants them.

Current ongoing large tasks

Workflow

Main page: Getting involved § Workflow

Use of milestones

We're trialing a clever use of milestones suggested by Jeroen van Meeuwen.

How it works

All bugs by default have the milestone future to indicate that "we'll do it at some point." If we have no intention of doing it, it should not be in Bugzilla.

For each (upcoming) release there is a version-next, such as 0.4-next. This contains everything we want fixed in the 0.4.x series.

As we approach each release, we create a milestone for its version number (following the example above, the milestone would be 0.4.0). Any bug we really want fixed before we can finalize that release then has its milestone changed from 0.4-next to 0.4.0. Any bug that we are happy to release 0.4.0 with, but still want fixed within the lifespan of the 0.4.x series remains in 0.4-next. This process then gets repeated for every release.

Summary

0.5.0 = really aiming to fix this in 0.5.0
0.5.1 = really aiming to fix this 0.5.1
0.5-next = aim to fix this at some point in the 0.5 series.

What should have a milestone

Bugs that we know how to fix, have a solid plan for resolving and have the resources to execute. Assigning everything to "0.4.0" when there's no way we can get it done will help no one.

It should remain a small list of high-priority tasks, such that developers can see what is important.

What bugs should I prioritize working on?

Anything tagged for the next release. In the case of the 0.4.0 milestone, then anything in 0.4-next, and finally anything in future.

Obviously, being free software, you're free to work on whatever the hell you want.

Naming policy

Main page: Naming Policy