GSoC 2021 Project: Modernizing Caya

Introduction

Hi! I’m Jaidyn Levesque (jadedctrl on IRC and elsewhere), a 2nd year Computer Science student. I’ve been using *nixes for several years now, and just moved over to Haiku as my main OS a little over a year ago. I’m lucky enough to be a mentee this summer, and I’m excited to get started!

Project

My GSoC project is to modernize Caya, a multi-protocol chat program. “Modernize” here means a couple different things: General updates, multi-user chats, and libpurple support. Caya is oriented around two-member chats, whose protocol is arbitrary, with protocol support being done through add-ons. It hasn’t seen much activity in the past few years, so my first goal is to get it running on modern Haiku. Afterwards, chats will be abstracted to allow for multiple users, enabling protocols like IRC to be implemented. The last goal, libpurple support, will involve writing a generic libpurple protocol for Caya.

libpurple is a multi-protocol chat library used by programs like Pidgin and Finch (libpurple-finch in ports). It has varying degrees of support for several protocols that right now lack native Haiku clients: Matrix, Discord, Slack, and others. With a libpurple addon, Caya should work as a native client for just about any of these protocols in one fell swoop.

As a part of this effort, I’ll also be writing ports for some of these libpurple add-ons. Right now Matrix and OMEMO (lurch) look like safe bets, being popularly used in libre communities, but I’d like to work on what people would find most useful.

If all goes well, Caya should be a usable chat program by summer’s end. I’ll make sure to add any updates to this article’s forum thread. Right now, you can find the git repository here.

Cheers! :)