[Psi-devel] [Delta] The future of Iris and Kopete

[Justin Karneges]

Hi guys,

(note: this should be the last message in the thread for psi-devel, continue 
at the delta list)

On Friday 19 May 2006 23:54, Olivier Goffart wrote:
> To reduce porting efforts, we have imported Qt4 libiris from Psi darcs
> repository in the psi-0.11 branch.

Good.

> Also, we have changed our buildsystem for KDE, we were using automake
> before and we switched to CMake.
> To make libiris compile, we needed to do changes to the files, like adding
> #include "file.moc" and adding VISIBILITY macros, which need more patches
> on libiris.

Visibility stuff should only be needed if you are exporting iris as a dynamic 
library.  The convention so far is just to compile everything in.

Why did you have to add extra moc includes?  It would seem to me that if any 
were missing, it would fail everywhere, not just with cmake.

> - What will happen to iris ? Psi seems to develop on a Qt4-ified libiris
> and Justin has started to work on the next generation

The Iris CVS is the "official" branch, however it is not usable in its current 
state.  The transition plan is that projects should use the Psi copy of Iris 
until the official branch is ready (thus, you are doing the right thing).  In 
fact, the high-level parts of the Psi copy are already somewhat official, 
since the plan is to merge those changes back into the official Iris branch 
once the low-level parts are ready.  "Next generation" work is only taking 
place on the low-level.

> - For now, it is hard to synchronize our version of iris with Psi, because
> it is hard to track only a portion of Psi's Darcs repository, also some
> tasks are in Psi code itself and not counting our patches that we need to
> apply.
>
> What we would like is Psi put libiris in a different Darcs repository (or
> another version control system), so we can share efforts on libiris where
> Justin, Psi developers and Kopete developers will have write-access. Also
> it would be nice to have a release of libiris so Linux distributions could
> start to package it.

I'd have no problem with this, provided that it is known to be unofficial.  
E.g., not all changes (particularly low-level ones) would be expected to be 
merged as-is into the official Iris CVS.  That is, it would be no different 
than the Psi Iris Copy of today, just better positioned for sharing.

My hope is that at some point Iris will be complete and modular enough that 
direct modification won't be necessary to add new features.  For many 
features this is already true actually.  It is probably only at that point 
where I'd consider packaging it.  I'm very very picky about API/ABI breakage 
of libraries.  This is why QCA 2.0 has been beta for nearly a year still.

-Justin