Le Weblog à Cassidy

I often see new contributors (and even seasoned hackers) wanting to hack on a GNOME module, say Empathy, trying to build it using:

jhbuild build empathy

This is obviously correct but asks jhbuild to build not only Empathy but also all its dependencies (62 modules) so you'll end up building most of the GNOME stack. While building a full GNOME stack may sometimes be useful that's generally not needed and definitely not the easiest and fastest way to proceed.

Here is what I usually do.

First I make sure to have installed all the dependencies of the module using your distribution packaging system. This is done on Fedora using:

sudo yum-builddep empathy

or on Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt-get build-dep empathy

If you are using a recent distribution, there are good chances that most of these dependencies are still recent enough to build the module you want to hack on. Of course, as you are trying to build the master branch of the project some dependencies may have been bumped to one of the latest developement releases. But first let's try to build just Empathy.

jhbuild buildone empathy

There are good chances that some dependencies are missing or are too old, you'll then see this kind of error message:

No package 'libsecret-1' found
Requested 'telepathy-glib >= 0.19.9' but version of Telepathy-GLib is 0.18.2

That means you'll have to build these two libraries in your jhbuild as well. Just check the list of depencies of the module to find the exact name of the module:

jhbuild list empathy | grep secret
jhbuild list empathy | grep telepathy

In this example you'll see you have to build the libsecret and telepathy-glib modules:

jhbuild buildone libsecret telepathy-glib

Of course these modules may have some extra depencies on their own so you may have to do some iteration of this process before being able to actually build the module you care about. But, from my experience, if you are using a recent distribution (like the latest Fedora release) the whole process will still be much faster than building the full stack. Furthermore, it will save you to have to deal with build errors from potentially 62 modules.

I'll lead an Empathy BoF session tomorrow (Tuesday) from 4 to 6 (room 2.2a) feel free to show up if you are interested about the recent redesign work we have done in Empathy and our plans for the future.

Btw, a bunch of people have asked me about two annoying Telepathy issues:

 * GTalk contacts not showing up. That's actually a telepathy-glib bug which has been fixed in 0.18.2. If you are running F17 you can upgrade by grabbing the package from updates-testing: yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update telepathy-glib

 * Not being able to chat with 'People Nearby' contacts. Turns out that's because of Fedora's stupid firewall blocking incoming connections; disabling the firewall should make you reachable with Salut.

GNOME 3.4 has been released since a short while and we didn't find the time to properly celebrate it here in Brussels. It's time to fix this critical mistake and so I'm glad to announce the GNOME Brussels Beer 3.4 party this Thursday. Feel free to join us if you're around and want to share some beers with us.

One of my favourite feature of my N900 is the ability to very easily call a contact using my SIP account. Calling phone numbers in Empathy through SIP is possible since a while using the New Call dialog but you have to enter the number manually which can be annoying. Thanks to Folks's evolution-data-server backend, GNOME 3.2 will allow you to very easily call contacts from your address book!

First step is to mark a SIP account as being able to call phone numbers. We added an option for that in the accounts dialog.

Then if an IM contact is linked to an Evolution one having at least a phone field, you can call him from the contact list! Soon you should be able to call IM contacts publishing their phone numbers in their personal personal info as well.

You can also call any contact using gnome-contact directly; just click on the phone icon next to the phone number.

This is pretty cool because thanks to gnome-shell's contact integration it's now easier than ever to call a contact. Just search for him in the Shell overview and then start the call from gnome-contacts. That's the kind of integration we were aiming for when we started the Telepathy and Folks projects and it's great to see that we are finally getting there!

One of our main goals during this developement cycle was to continue improving Empathy's user experience by re-designing different parts of the UI. To do so our Empathy team at Collabora worked closely with designers from the awesome GNOME Design Team.

The log viewer has been completely re-written based on an original design from Matthew Paul Thomas (Canonical). As you can see, this new log viewer now displays calls and offers different options to easily search through the mass of logs.

Empathy 3.2 will also introduce a whole new experimental user interface for audio and video calls designed by Nick Richards (Intel). The new UI is based on Clutter and allows users to select the webcam and microphone used during the call, move the video preview around, etc. It should also gain support for video effects once Raluca finishes integrating her work with Nick's design. This new UI will be optional in 3.2 as it relies on new Telepathy API but will definitely become the default as soon as those API are stabilised.

Not actually me

I have to say that working closely with designers is a really enjoyable experience. It's good to have people to ask to when we are unsure about the best way to present a feature or an option to users. I'm really looking forward to continuing to improve Empathy with them.

Like 36 other Collaborans, I'm going to attend to the Desktop Summit in Berlin.

I'll lead the GNOME IM integration BoF session on Thursday. It will basically be a follow up of our Hackfest in June so if you are interested into instant messaging integration in GNOME feel free to join us.

The GNOME 3.0 Brussels Launch Party will be this Wednesday at Chaff (the same place where we did our first GNOME beer event) from 6:30 pm.

We'll order food around 8 and we'll have a bunch of GNOME 3 goodies to give away.

I know it's pretty short notice, sorry for that, but we had some troubles to find a place. We were initially looking for a place that would have allowed us to do some presentations but didn't find any. Anyway, we'll have beers which is certainly the most important thing. :)

See you there!

We have a ressonably good Belgian GNOME community (for such a small country) but even so we only see each other once or twice per year. In order to try to improve that I'm happy to announce the first GNOME Brussels Beer event which will take place the 15th December^[1].

The idea is pretty similar to the London Beer events: meet at some nice place to discuss around some beers (except ours will be proper beers ;).

So if you're around Brussels this day, feel free to join us!

As a good GNOME citizen, Empathy 3.0 will have to be able to build with GTK+3. As Ubuntu is not going to ship GTK+3 by default in its next release, we decided to stay compatible with GTK+2 for this cycle.

Empathy already built with GSEAL checks so porting was just a matter of playing with autoconf. Libraries linking to GTK+ itself have to be updated as we can't use GTK+2 and GTK+3 in the same process:

• libcanberra-gtk, webkit-gtk and libunique now have releases using GTK+3 instead of GTK+2 so all we had to do was to change the PKG_CHECK_MODULES calls to check for the -3 flavour of the libs.

• nautilus-sendto plugin has been ported as well since 2.90.0 but it breaks its public API so we had to do some #ifdef magic to stay compatible with older versions.

• Since 0.5.1 libnotify doesn't link on GTK+ any more but use GModule instead (Thanks Bastien!) so we just had to make sure that this version was used when building with GTK+3.

• Unfortunately clutter-gtk and champlain haven't been ported to GTK+3 yet so we had to disable champlain support for now. I hope to see a port of these libs soon.

During configure, we check if GTK+3 is present; if it is then we check for these new version of the deps. If it's not or if Empathy has been configured with --enable-gtk3=no then we continue to use GTK+2 and the old versions of the libs.

If you're interested in details, everything has been merged to master so you just have to look at Empathy's configure.ac file.

This should hopefully make all the distributions happy during the transition. Once Empathy 3.0 is released we'll drop GTK+2 compatiblity and will start using the fancy new features offered by GTK+3.

One of my favorite new feature in Empathy 2.28 is definitely the Vino and Vinagre integration. Users can now easily share their desktop with their contacts by a simple click in Empathy. The contact then receives an invitation which will automatically launch Vinagre and connect it to the Vino server of the sharer. No need to worry about sending your internet IP or open and forward a port in your firewall; all the technical details are hidden to offer the easiest user experience as possible.

This integration between IM and application is done by using Telepathy tubes in Vino and Vinagre. Kudos to Arnaud Maillet who worked on this as his internship project at Collabora and to the Vino/Vinagre developpers who welcomed our work with lot of enthusiasm.

With the switch to Mission Control 5, I hope to see more and more projects starting to use Telepathy in order to increase the collaborative user experience in the GNOME desktop.

What next?

Better integration

Mission Control 5 and the new ContactCapabilities interface will allow us to improve the integration during the 2.30 cycle. We'll be able to hide the 'Share my desktop' button if Vino hasn't been built with Telepathy support and to unsensitive it if the contact doesn't have a tube enabled Vinagre installed.

Better performance

Currently telepathy-gabble tries to connect the tube to the peer using the following algorithm:

• If available connect to peer's IPv6 address
• Try to connect to peer's IPv4 address
• Try to use a SOCKS5 proxy
• Fallback to IBB

That means that if your are on a different LAN than your contact, without IPv6, and that your Jabber doesn't provide a fast SOCKS5 proxy, the connection will be pretty slow. We hope to solve this at some point by implementing stream tube Jingle NAT penetration in telepathy-gabble. Thanks to the Telepathy abstraction, Vino and Vinagre won't have to change a single line of code to benefit from this improvement; they'll magically start to use it as soon as Gabble gains this feature!

KDE interoperability

George is also working on implementing similar feature in KDE using Kopete, krdb and krdc. Easy cross desktop sharing is coming!

Screenshots

Share your desktop in one click