Introduction
The coding period for GSoC 2023 has officially started. Nowadays, I am mostly working on improving the integrations provided by Zulip. This blog post will be a summary of the work I have done in the first week of the coding period. I will also talk about the challenges I faced and the lessons I learned along the way.
The first week
I think I have worked with Zulip for almost 3 months so the coding period didn’t felt like something different. I had some issues figured out on which I could work. One of them was related to the GitHub Integration and another was related to GitLab Integration. Apart from these, I also started working on creating a highly requested but small feature for Zulip which is about adding an option to add a link to an audio call — right now through Jitsi Meet — to the chat.
GitHub Integration
The issue was regarding changing the behavior of notifications sent by the integration when an issue is labeled or unlabeled. Currently, the integration sends a very vague notification that had no information about the labels added or removed. So, I started working on this issue.
I have been working on the GitHub integration for a while now. So, I was familiar with the codebase. I started by adding the fixtures for the events. Then, I had to modify the codebase to send a better message that included the labels added or removed. After some discussion with the community members it was decided to do something so that the end-user can decide whether they want the notification for the issue labeled events or not.
The way we provide the end-user with the choices is that they can add query params to the URL on the webhook mentioning the events for which they want to receive the notifications — they can also exclude some events if they want.
This is what the documentation says:
To filter the events that trigger the notifications, you can append either &only_events=["event_a","event_b"] or &exclude_events=["event_a","event_b"] (or both, with different events) to the URL with an arbitrary number of supported events.On the flipside GitHub also provides filtering of events, but they do not provide that granular controls over the events that was required in this case. In their UI, the choice is to either get all events related to Issues or none.
I have made the changes to Pull Request and I think it is ready for review. It should be merged soon! 🔥
GitLab Integration
So, GitLab in its 16.0 release decide to deprecate the URL format that they used earlier. This change kind of brokes the integration as till now the integration would create various URLs by taking information from different parts of the payload. But, that format is no longer supported. So, I started working on this issue.
The issue mentioned that we should use the link provided by GitLab in the payload. So, I started working on this issue. I started by adding the fixtures for the events. Then, I had to modify the codebase to use the link provided by GitLab.
While I was working on this one, I realized that the payload that is
received when a comment is done a snippet didn’t contain the link.
So, I had to modify the codebase to handle that case as well. So for
that, I created a post on the GitLab forum and left. Now when I told
my mentor about this, he told me why not go ahead and fix that by
myself as GitLab is an open-source project. So, right now I have
started working on that as well. But I think that experience required
a separate blog post. So, I will write about that later.
Feature Request
Before explaining the feature request, I would like to give a brief backstory about the current feature that is available in Zulip. So when a user is composing a message they can add a link to a video call by clicking on the video call icon. This will add a link to the message which then can be used by other users to join the video call. For Jitsi Meet, when the link is clicked, it opens a new tab in the browser and the user’s camera is turned on automatically. This feature request is about adding an audio call button in which the user’s camera is not turned on automatically.
I started working on this issue. A similar feature of adding a Video Call was already available in Zulip. So, I had to figure out how that was implemented and then had to implement the same for Audio Call. I have created an implementation of that but the design has to be discussed in chat.zulip.org. So, I am waiting for the feedback from the community.
Conclusion
So, this was a summary of the work I have done in the first week of the coding period. I will be writing more blog posts in the coming weeks. So, stay tuned! 🔥