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So has anyone ever tried to build telepathy-butterfly for Maemo? It seems to me that such an attempt would be far less complicated than telepathy-haze for MSN support, since Haze requires ridiculous dependencies like a 20MB download of pidgin-data.

I don't have Scratchbox working, but I would try it if I did

Info available on the Telepathy wiki:
http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Components

Scroll down a bit and you'll find some links about Butterfly under "In Development". It works fine for me on my Ubuntu desktop, including multi user chat support.

Okay, so I went and installed scratchbox in a 32-bit VM.

pymsn and python-crypto are two things we need but are not packaged. They all build and install happily in scratchbox, but that thing is making me crazy so I don't think I can get them packaged myself. I'll try to free up some space on my tablet for the development stuff and see if I can just install it all from source there (and therefore actually test the thing). GCC doesn't seem to exist for the tablet in any easily accessible form (although it comes AMAZINGLY close to), so I guess I'll have to get creative or figure out how to build a Maemo-ified debian package from scratchbox at least once.

Oddly enough, though, I think this may be the easiest way since then I don't need to worry about having a million different python interpreters bouncing around...

Edit:
OMG this man is my hero!

Edit Edit:

Okay, adding that repository (for bora!) is a bit scary, but the one package I needed (python-crypto) and a few of its dependencies which are only from there (python-central, which we don't actually seem to need but it shuts apt up) seem to operate just fine.

Also need python2.5-pyopenssl and python2.5-dev.

Now pymsn, telepathy-python and telepathy-butterfly can be built and installed from source. Awesome! Still not appearing in the chat client, but that shouldn't be too hard... Just need to add a profile to the rtcomm profiles directory and cross my fingers!
Now all we need is a Debian packaging ninja to make this super easy for anyone!

It still needs some love to tidy up the loose ends, since we lack icons and whatnot for rtcomm.

Sounds awesome! Can't wait for a deb for this, though I do have to question, with all the python related stuff is this really any more lightweight than the current haze module? I mean presumably so, but I'm curious... also, does it offer any extra features or something that differentiate it from haze?

See this faq in the telepathy wiki Short version with libpurple 2.5 not much, but I believe the libpurple used by the telepathy in Diablo is older than 2.5 or at least older than the libpurple used by the pidgin client available for Diablo.

Gah. Got a reasonable distance really easily. It was reporting and downloading statuses and avatars. However, it was throwing errors when I tried initiating conversations. I probably should pursue this further since I'm sure the issue at hand can be diagnosed reasonably smoothly, but I just discovered that there is a technology for Jabber servers called Transports; essentially adapters to other protocols like MSN.

The latest version of the MSN Transport (pymsnt) uses the very same pymsn applied for telepathy-butterfly! http://delx.net.au/projects/pymsnt/

The major risk is that this adds yet another party you must trust with login info, and to make matters worse most of the easily trustable servers (eg: Jabber.org) do not host MSN transports. Gizmo5 uses Jabber and has an MSN transport, although I suspect it is a bit dated. Does the trick for me though. (Gizmo Project is definitely trustworthy - and very active - and that's the important bit. Some day they'll update their MSN transport and I will be happy).
Easiest to do the initial setup via the Gizmo client, but then you can use the device's native chat client connecting to chat.gizmoproject.com via Jabber.

I guess the best approach, if you can, is to host your own Jabber server and put the transport there. (My reason #9 out of 10 to set up a miniature personal server).

This approach is a bit funny, but I bet it saves a bit of battery life, too, since now the device just has the one connection to a single Jabber server. Oh, and it rescues you from that Enormous Pidgin dependency.


If anyone else wants to play with the Butterfly stuff, there is the connection manager profile for rtcomm. Create the following in /usr/share/osso-rtcomm/butterfly.profile:

Hi, you might be interested in this discussion:

RTComm Beta Features in Fremantle?