# Telepathy for Delta Chat

## Who

Authored by [Nick Thomas](https://ur.gs) under the [MIT License](LICENSE).

## What

[Delta Chat](https://delta.chat) is IM over email.
[Telepathy](https://telepathy.freedesktop.org) is a framework for abstracting
over multiple IM protocols. This project glues the two together, allowing
Telepathy clients to send/receive Delta messages.

Telepathy CMs should have a name that is not the same as their protocol; so this
CM is hereby named "padfoot".

My first attempt was [purple-plugin-delta](https://code.ur.gs/lupine/purple-plugin-delta). This has some licensing issues (linking libpurple with OpenSSL)
that will be resolved with OpenSSL v3.0.0. At least until then, I've lost
interest in it; my efforts are going into this version instead.

## When

When it's ready.

## Where

Here's where we're at right now:

- [x] Connect to DBUS
- [x] Advertise enough properties / interfaces to become visible in Empathy
- [x] Connect to deltachat-core-rust
- [x] Set up an account via autoconfiguration
- [x] Appear as online in Empathy
- [~] Disconnect!
- [ ] Set up an account manually
- [ ] Contacts handling
- [ ] Text messages
- [ ] Multimedia messages
- [ ] Setup messages
- [ ] Import/Export
- [ ] Group chats
- [ ] Geolocation messages

## Why

Mobile IM, mostly. Desktop IM, also. It's ideal for my pinephone, and lighter
than the electron desktop client.

At this point, I don't know Rust, I don't know DBUS, I don't know Telepathy, and
I don't know Deltachat particularly well either. So this also functions as a
learning exercise!

## How

This project is written in Rust, so you'll need a rust compiler to build it.
[Rustup]() comes highly recommended. Deltachat is also written in Rust and it
needs the `nightly` version, so follow the instructions for that.

It makes use of the `dbus-codegen-rust` crate to convert the
[telepathy interface specs](https://github.com/TelepathyIM/telepathy-spec) into
the executable code in `src/telepathy`. This is checked in, but can be
regenerated like so:

```bash
$ git submodule init telepathy-spec
$ git submodule update telepathy-spec
$ cargo install dbus-codegen-rust
$ ./scripts/dbus-codegen
```

`dbus-codegen-rust` doesn't seem to handle namespaced attributes properly, so
we modify the XML files in `telepathy-spec`... with `sed`. The `tp:type`
attribute is renamed to `tp:typehint`.