[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Re: Tapioca, Cohoba, Telepathy ... oh my!

[From: Robert McQueen]

Hi Michael,

As the article says, Telepathy was developed from the original idea and
proof of concept by us (Collabora) in association with Nokia. Tapioca
started out as a seperate project with its own developers,
specification, backends and frontends, although we shared a bit of code
on GStreamer, Farsight & libjingle for the streaming to support Google
Talk voice calls. I think at the time that the article was written, this
was still the case.

Thankfully, that situation has now changed, and the duplicated effort
has stopped already. A few months back we joined forces with the Tapioca
project to move towards a more complete stack based around the Telepathy
spec. The Tapioca project is now doing absolutely superb work on client
libraries for the Telepathy framework, including the C# library which is
basis for the very cool-looking Landell client which is nearing it's 1st
Telepathy release.

To answer your more technical questions, Cohoba will probably never show
up on the 770. There's no need - the 770 already has an excellent set of
Telepathy clients provided by Nokia! The Chat, Call & Address Book
applications, control panel applet, status bar & task navigator plugins
do an excellent job of integrating Telepathy into the device.

Cohoba is just a Python client on top of Telepathy which was written to
try and let desktop/GNOME users make use of the backend stuff such as
the XMPP backend, Gabble, and VOIP Engine which are used on the 770. Now
there are already some more promising projects such as Landell under
way, and the Gossip (GNOME) and Kopete (KDE) IM clients have also shown
interest and are experimenting with Telepathy support.

For SIP, watch this space. Nokia have already released an IRC backend
(telepathy-idle), and the Nokia Research team who work on Sofia-SIP are
also working on a telepathy-sofia backend which they should be releasing
soon. If Telepathy is doing its job properly, it should just drop in to
place and let all of the existing clients speak SIP.

As one of the lead developers of Telepathy, I personally am very happy
and excited to see this happening. I hate to see the duplication of
effort and fragmented development too, and the whole idea of Telepathy
is that the backend and frontend work can be split up and shared out. We
certainly wouldn't be able to start from scratch and produce the
polished multi-protocol all-singing and all-dancing IM experience that
people are looking for without help from people like the Tapioca
project, and now we're pulling in the same direction we should get there
sooner too. :)

Regards,
Rob

Michael Wiktowy wrote:
> Greetings list,
> 
> I eagerly anticipate a nice GUI-fied (i.e. not sophia-sip) generic SIP
> client for use on the 770. I had my hopes up when Tapioca was released for
> the 770 but was confused that it didn't include SIP support ... even in the
> Gnome version. Now Tapioca seems somewhat ... adrift.
> 
> I read in one of the latest linux magazines an article on Telepathy that
> praises the Nokia for adopting it for the N770 and contributing to the
> project and mentions several other clients but doesn't mention Tapioca ...
> nor does the Telepathy website. One that they do mention is Cohoba and
> looking at the website, it looks a whole lot like it was based on Tapioca.
> 
> I hate to see all this splintered development essentially doing the same
> work.
> So I figured that I would ask on this list since it is likely to contain
> the
> people in the know ... is Tapioca abandoned? Is work on-going in Cohoba?
> Are
> we going to see Cohoba for the 770? Sometime soon?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> /Mike