[Sugar-devel] Jabber client activity

[Guillaume Desmottes]

Le lundi 22 décembre 2008 à 10:52 +0100, Tomeu Vizoso a écrit :
> [adding sugar-devel as this is of interest also outside OLPC]
> 
> On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 23:49, Mildred Ki'Lya <ml.mildred593 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > I'm new here, and I came interested in the OLPC project because it's a
> > wonderful computer, very well integrated, and I just had one via the
> > European G1G1 project. And now, I thought I could contribute :)
> >
> > I wanted to know if there was any project of creating an activity that
> > would be a jabber client. If so, could I help, where is it? And if not,
> > perhaps I should start one.
> 
> Actually, having Chat working as a regular IM client would be very
> interesting and may not be a very big project. The only missing piece
> is being able to add contacts to your roster other than through the
> mesh view.

Sugar *is* a jabber client, not only Chat but the whole sugar/sucrose.
Chat is used to chat (!) with your contacts, the mesh view is your buddy
list and VideoChat is suppose to be used for... audio/video chat.
The Telepathy framework offers you the possibility to split the
different features of your client (roster, chat, audio chat, logger,
etc) into different applications.

One big missing piece is the ability to add contacts by entering their
jid and UI to accept/decline friend requests. This is
https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8841

Another one is the ability to run more than one account/connection. Main
problem here is the UI. How should we display that? Tabbed mesh views
maybe?

Once this is done, you'll be able to use your normal IM accounts on
Sugar and be able to chat with them using Chat, send them files using
journal object sharing and call them with VideoChat.

Actually, as Sugar is using Telepathy, it's much more than a Jabber
client. By being a real Telepathy client, it could become a IRC, MSN,
SIP (or whatever protocol) client!
I talked about that during one of my Sugarcamp conf:
http://people.collabora.co.uk/~cassidy/talks/sugar-camp-futur-of-collab.pdf

We'll be happy to help any contributor interested in working on this.
Just come and say hi on #sugar or #telepathy.
But *please*, let's not waste time and resources on implementing a gajim
or pidgin activity. We already have an existing flexible and performant
IM framework; we just need to integrate it properly in Sugar to offer a
rocking user experience.


	G.

> I think the idea is to add a palette option somewhere that allows you
> to type or paste a contact ID so it will appear in your friends view.
> Then you would get presence notification, the ability to chat and
> transfer files, and with some extra work, a/v conversations.
> 
> If someone would like to jump on this challenge, it's there waiting for you!