pymsn, butterfly and empathy

This weekend, Ali got his msnp2p stack polished so we could work on some p2p integration in pymsn. This led display pictures (aka avatars) to land into the library. That means we are really close to release the new version of pymsn on which we’re working for several months now.

Today, as we were implementing display pictures in pymsn, I wrote the telepathy-butterfly (the MSN connection manager for Telepathy based on pymsn) part for avatars, which was a good opportunity to test the new feature. This closes the list of features to implement into butterfly before a release as well, since I got groups and aliasing (you can nickname your buddies) working in the past days. Contact handles format was changed to support Yahoo contacts in butterfly (as pymsn, covering MSNP15, allows it).I’ve tried to integrate the pymsn offline messages feature into butterfly but I wasn’t pleased with it so it’s sleeping in a separate branch for now. However, I’d like to get full membership groups management too to be able to add/remove contacts, block them, etc.

The next screenshot shows empathy displaying my personal MSN account using telepathy-butterfly. I’m really glad that we are finally getting concrete things to show

an OpenIM proposal

I finally wrote a freedesktop.org project request for the OpenIM thing that Ali and I (and certainly lots of other people involved in IM protocols reverse engineering) would like to see come up. The request is a bug report on freedesktop bugzilla, please bring your observations and ideas! Here is quoted the text of the proposal :

This is about a new project that I would like to see come up under the fd.o banner.

I’m part of the pymsn project. Our goal is to provide a full implementation of the latest MSN Messenger protocol for interoperability purpose. So far the project is kind of hosted by Telepathy since it’s the base library for telepathy-butterfly but this is clearly not the place where it should be.

Based on that observation, we would like to build an OpenIM initiative. Such a project would aim to the gathering of people working on the opening of closed instant messaging protocols.

One of the most important goal in this would to have centralized shared documentation on protocols and a clear follow up of features implemented in each project.