Since such posts do seem to be all the fashion, or at least some of it, I thought it’d only be fair for me to write one as well.

For my first week of GSOC 2008, I’ve done … well, not a lot. At least, not as much as I ought.

It’s a bit unfair to expect you (the reader) to know my project off-hand, so as a bit of a refresher, I’m working on a Multi-User Chat (both via IM services and IRC) application for the GNOME desktop using the Telepathy framework and libempathy(-gtk). This week, my goal was to nearly complete the necessary language bindings for libmissioncontrol and libtelepathy-glib in order to write this application. As far as getting any of that into code, nothing happened much.

Why is that?

Well, I made a last minute design decision to change the language I’d be using for this project; I decided to use C# (through Mono) rather than Python. Now, I’d rather not get into the semantics of my decision, mostly because I’m more than willing to admit that some of my reasons for this were at best unfair to Python, and a languages war isn’t the best way to actually get stuff done. So, while I’ve been not-coding this week, I’ve been working away at learning the semantics of C#, as well as learning the core libraries, and finally, and most importantly, how to generate bindings for C code using GAPI. This means that starting tomorrow (ie. Week Two), I should be able to start tearing into writing my two bindings, and even giving myself until Thursday the 5th of June, I’ll still be on schedule.

Aside

Over last night, Alexander Hixon (halex) and I have been hacking away at the Radio extension for Banshee, which will be offered with the 1.1 release due sometime after 1.0 is pushed out the door. It’s looking fairly good so far, and with all luck, will get finished today or tomorrow (timezones and what-not).

While we’ve been doing that, Alex has also been hacking away at one of the most requested features for Banshee since ever: LibraryWatcher plugin. It does what you’d think—it watches your music library folder for any changes and updates your library to reflect those changes.

Anyone interested in diving in should fork the repo on GitHub¹.

¹ This is just a small unofficial repository for some quick development of a couple extensions. The official Banshee repository lies in GNOME SVN, at this location.