Plans for the next cycle

So it's that time of the ½ year when one starts to think on what to spend his next months. Of course it will depend on what my employer thinks it's best, but this is what I'm thinking right now.

Port Sugar to telepathy-glib: right now Sugar uses Telepathy via python-dbus, which is a quite low level API. The code could get considerably shorter and simpler by using the higher level API in telepathy-glib. For that, we would need to use gobject-introspection because there are no plans for static bindings for Python.

Expose extended contact attributes through an official addition to telepathy-spec: Right now Sugar is using an extension to telepathy-salut and telepathy-gabble for discovering additional information about the online contacts. In our effort to make Sugar a regular Telepathy user and reducing the maintenance burden of such extensions, we should move to use only official additions to telepathy-spec.

Expose activities through an official addition to telepathy-spec: In Sugar you can discover which activities are being publicly shared by your contacts, join them and also send and receive private invites. This is basically announcing which applications running in your desktop have collaboration capabilities by means of IM channels. Same as above, we need to move to use interfaces of more general use.

Port Sugar to GNOME 3: Sugar's cycle is synchronized with GNOME, Fedora and Ubuntu so each release can be more easily packaged and delivered by distros. Though Gtk+2 and Gtk+3 are installable in parallel, the lamentable state in which the stable Python GNOME bindings are means nobody is there to maintain all the bindings and much less for wrapping new APIs such as GSettings. For the sake of moving along with our platform, we'll have to port Sugar and all the activities to GNOME 3 through with gobject-introspection. PyGObject is very close to have feature-complete support for introspection but still will take quite a bit of work to make it stable.