KTp/Packaging Guide

Welcome to the KDE Telepathy Development Wiki Current Version: 23.07.70

KDE Telepathy  Mostly written in C++  Mature, well-established codebase  Well-commented source code  Small development team  Decreasing Y-O-Y development activity  2 active contributors Commit Activity Timeline: more at  Updated Feb 22, 2024

Packaging KDE-Telepathy is complicated for two reasons: firstly, due to the modular nature of Telepathy, there are several distinct components in separate git repositories. Secondly, there are large numbers of runtime interdependencies to worry about. This page attempts to ease packaging KDE-Telepathy in a useful way by explaining these issues.

Upstream Packages

Several upstream packages are essential for KDE-Telepathy to work. These are the ones encountered as dependencies in a normal compilation:

• telepathy-qt4 >= LATEST (currently 0.9.2.1, Build and Runtime Dependency)
• telepathy-mission-control >= 5.7.9 (Runtime Dependency)
• QJson build dependency for ktp-auth-handler.
• qt-gstreamer for building ktp-call-ui.
• telepathy-logger if you ware going to compile telepathy-logger-qt.

We're also using some bits from kdelibs 4.7.0 (Build and Runtime Dependency).

The IM networks that KDE-Telepathy can connect to are decided by which Telepathy Connection Managers are installed. These are runtime only dependencies, but which ones are installed will decide what IM networks KDE-Telepathy supports. The following are the ones we recommend - whether they are installed optionally or required is, of course, up to you.

• telepathy-gabble 0.13.7 (for Jabber support, including Google Talk and Facebook, might very probably crash with earlier versions)
• telepathy-haze (for all the other protocols, as supported by libpurple).
• It seems like telepathy-farstream should be compiled before telepathy-qt for compilation of ktp-call-ui to proceed.

KDE-Telepathy Packages

The different components of KDE-Telepathy are housed in separate git repositories on projects.kde.org. Some of these components are currently recommended to use. Others are not yet ready to be installed by users.

Ready Components

These components have reached a level of maturity where they are interesting to users. We recommend providing these components at the current time.

Name	Description	Dependencies
ktp-common-internals	Internal library	telepathy-qt
ktp-accounts-kcm	Account management KCM	ktp-common-internals
ktp-approver	KDED module that shows a notification when somebody starts a chat with you	ktp-common-internals
ktp-text-ui	Text chat application	ktp-common-internals
ktp-contact-list	Contact list application - Also provides icons and other data files that are shared among the other applications	ktp-common-internals
ktp-kded-integration-module	Workspace integration module - provides several plugins like auto-away, the infamous 'Now listening to...' and also an error handler (important!!)	ktp-common-internals
ktp-desktop-applets	Plasma widgets (presence applet which acts as the central system tray icon of traditional IM clients, a simplified contact list, an applet which represents a single contact and can be used to trigger actions like "send mail", "initiate conversation", …)	ktp-common-internals
ktp-filetransfer-handler	Background application for handling file tranfers	ktp-common-internals
ktp-auth-handler	Background application for handling passwords and ssl certificates	ktp-common-internals
ktp-send-file	Dolphin/konqueror context menu plugin for sending files easily to contacts	ktp-common-internals, ktp-filetransfer-handler (at runtime)
ktp-call-ui	Voice and Video chat with contacts	ktp-common-internals
ktp-contact-runner	Show contact in KRunner	ktp-common-internals
telepathy-logger-qt	Provides support for loading saved message logs	ktp-common-internals, telepathy-logger, qt-glib

Required components for basic functionality: ktp-accounts-kcm, ktp-contact-list, ktp-text-ui, ktp-auth-handler, ktp-kded-integration-module

Highly recommended components (should be installed by default): ktp-approver, ktp-desktop-applets, ktp-call-ui, ktp-filetransfer-handler, telepathy-logger-qt, ktp-contact-runner

Optional components: ktp-send-file

Experimental Components

We have several other components under development, however, unless they are listed above we do not recommend packaging them. This is because they are subject to major changes/removal at any time, and are not ready for end users yet.

Note about accounts-kcm-plugins

Our 0.1.0 release had an extra package called telepathy-kde-accounts-kcm-plugins. These plugins have now been merged to the main telepathy-kde-accounts-kcm package and are no longer shipped separately.

Release Tarballs

The latest release is the 0.7.0

Tarballs can be found at the KDE ftp mirrors: http://download.kde.org/stable/kde-telepathy/0.7.0/src/

Distributions

Here is a list of known packaging efforst for various distributions. If you are also doing packages for a distribution, add your information here.

Distro	Packager	Links
Debian	George Kiagiadakis <[email protected]>	http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/ (pkg-kde/kde-extras/kde-telepathy/* repos)
Ubuntu	Michał Zając <[email protected]>	Source: same as debian Binaries: https://launchpad.net/~telepathy-kde/+archive/ppa (stable) Binaries: https://launchpad.net/~telepathy-kde/+archive/daily-builds (latest)
openSUSE	The openSUSE Community ([email protected])	http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Extra (repository).
Arch Linux	Andrea Scarpino (bash) <[email protected]>	https://www.archlinux.org/groups/x86_64/kde-telepathy/
Gentoo	KDE Herd <[email protected]>	http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/net-im/kde-telepathy-meta/
Chakra	Anke Boersma (abveritas) <[email protected]>	http://www.chakra-project.org/packages/index.php?act=search&searchpattern=telepathy
FreeBSD	Alberto Villa (avilla) <[email protected]>	http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/PORTS/net-im (repository) http://FreeBSD.kde.org/area51.php (instructions)
Fedora	Jan Grulich (jgrulich) <[email protected]>	https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/list/ktp-*