emesene development strikes back

[Riccardo (c10ud)]

Since the lightning-fast 2.12.3 release, the emesene team has been
busy fixing bugs and cooking up new features.

Thanks to our friend Jose "pepeleproso" Rostagno you can now enjoy a
fully-featured emesene in gtk3 which blends seamlessly in all the
bleeding-edge Operative Systems such as Ubuntu 12.04 and Arch.
You just need some gobject-introspection packages (gir-1.2-*, usually
installed by default) and if such conditions are met you will get the
new gtk3 user interface automagically (and hopefully won't notice
anything different from the old one ;)). Please note that gtk3 does
NOT mean python3: you still need python2.

Other than that, I integrated and fixed an old patch from
Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne which should enable direct file
transfers in emesene. Yeah, fast file transfers as in direct
connection between you and your buddy.
This is still early stage and tested only in a pretty restricted
environment such as "local transfer between emesene and emesene", but
the more you test it the better it will become (hopefully, thanks to
the feedbacks).

We also have the usual load of bugfixes (msn protocol, gui,
facebook..), but this post is more a call for developers and testers
to try and partecipate to the development version so we can make the
next release better.

As an example, we're looking forward replacing xmpppy with SleekXMPP
for the jabber backend. This way we can use a nice and actively
mantained fully-featured library for all your GTalk, Facebook and
MSN-XMPP (!) needs. Some work has already been done but since we're
short on manpower you know what to do: check out the emesene/sleekxmpp
branch and start hacking!

Also, the Qt4 user interface has been fixed so it can run but it still
isn't on par with the gtk{2,3} one. If you're interested in fixing it
so it becomes as awesome as gtks the code lives in the main emesene
branch.

If you have any question, just use the usual channels such as mailing
lists, google groups, github issues, irc.

That would be all!
Oh, if you only want to test the development version and don't know
anything about git, etc. just download a snapshot from
https://github.com/emesene/emesene/zipball/master

-- Riccardo (c10ud)