MUC/IRC Application -- Week 1 Report

["Will Farrington" <wcfarrington gmail com>]

This one's copy/pasted from my blog post on the matter:

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.