Blog d’un « connard amer »™

Hi English-speaking people. I have been selected to participate at the Google Summer of Code 2009. My mentoring organization is PSF, the project is Gajim and my mentor is Asterix (he can be found on the official Gajim room).

It is the first time that Gajim is not mentored by XSF because Peter Saint-Andre^W^WXSF decided not to participate this year. Despite this, there are twelve students that will work on XMPP this summer. So, I am one of them.

Let me introduce Gajim to you. Gajim is an instant messaging client for the XMPP protocol, written in Python and PyGTK. Year after year Gajim earns new features but it's still missing two very important which are very useful when you use your account with several clients and/or several computers and when you have a big roster. So you have chat logs in several places and that becomes a problem when you want to do a search. And when you have a lot of contacts, you have to wait for the server to send the full contact list, so you may have to wait until one minute before you can do something if your roster is very big. That is why I'm intending to develop server-side history and roster versioning for Gajim.

Gajim is no more my main XMPP client. For now it is jabber.el. So, why the hell do I work on Gajim? There are two reasons:

• I have used Gajim for several months. Despite the fact that I no more use it, it's always the XMPP client that I recommand to new users.
• I reported several bugs (some on the BTS, others directly to Jim++ and/or to Asterix). I have organized a bug squashing party. And I also submited some patchs. (yeah, I have my name in the THANKS /o)

For those reasons, I think I am well situated for this. It is also an occasion for me to be involved a little more in a free software project which is not from me. Furthermore, Gajim is migrating to Mercurial. It is been a while I want to migrate my own projects from Subversion to Mercurial, to take advantage of a decentralized VCS, so it is the occasion for me to test Mercurial on a real project.

About the schedule, I plan to develop roster versioning from May, 23^rd, to June, 17^th and server-side history from June, 18^th, to August, 17^th.

To finish, I want to thank my mentor, Asterix, which will have to support me during three months. I also want to thank PSF to take Gajim under one's wing for this GSoC. So, thanks Asterix and PSF!