KDE Telepathy 0.1 released! Part 4 of 5 – File Transfer Handler

Sorry, no fancy UI for this component.

This is a small module (nonetheless quite painful to test) that just handles file transfer, nothing more and nothing less (even accepting/refusing file transfer is a task for the approver, therefore it is not handled by this module). You won’t usually see anything, except a kjob running in the notification area and some info messages. The handler will be started automatically when a new incoming/outgoing file transfer should be handled and will exit (if no other file transfer channels are received) a few seconds after finishing its job.

The cool thing is ANY program from your desktop can just request the file transfer! Telepathy Mission Control will assign the file transfer channel to the file transfer handler, that will take care about transferring the file to your contact.

To demonstrate that it works, here’s a screenshot!

Transfer Completed! (Yes, it works sometimes)

Transfer Completed! (Yes, it works sometimes)

Ok, I admit that the screenshot is ugly and useless 😀

It still has several issues, first of all at the moment it just works (sometimes) with gabble (Jabber/XMPP) and salut (local link), because the other connection managers don’t support the URI property, therefore the handler will receive the channel, but won’t know which file should be sent. David fixed this for butterfly (MSN) but the patch was not integrated upstream yet. Moreover, for some reason it doesn’t work every time, failure reports (but also success reports!) are very appreciated! (You can use the bug tracker to report a new bug, attach the information to an existing bug or ping me on #kde-telepathy). Please attach to your reports the log from the file transfer handler (you can see the log running on a shell “telepathy-kde-filetransfer-handler --debug --persist” before starting the file transfer) and possibly the accounts that you and your contact are using (not the whole uid but at least the server “@xxxx.xx” part).

Note: When file transfer fails you will probably have a job running in your notification area that is impossible to remove unless you logout or remove the notification area from your system tray and re-add it. That’s a known issue, I’m working on it. Sorry about that.


File transfer handler comes together with a dolphin plugin! You will be able to send files just by right clicking on the files from dolphin:

Dolphin Plugin

Dolphin Plugin

This will open a dialog where you will be able to choose the recipient.

Send File Dialog

Send File Dialog

Sorry, sending multiple files and multiple recipients are not supported (yet).


By the way… Yes, I’m going to at Desktop Summit in Berlin!

I'm going to Desktop Summit - Berlin 2012