Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.22

[Xavier Claessens <xclaesse gmail com>]

Hi,

* Proposal: Include Empathy in GNOME 2.22 desktop.

* Purpose: Empathy [1] consists of a rich set of reusable instant
messaging widgets, and a GNOME client using those widgets. It uses
Telepathy and Nokia's Mission Control, and reuses Gossip's UI. The main
goal is to permit desktop integration by providing libempathy and
libempathy-gtk libraries. libempathy-gtk is a set of powerful widgets
that can be embeded into any GNOME application.

* Dependencies:
   glib-2.0 >= 2.14.0
   gconf-2.0 >= 1.2.0
   libxml-2.0
   gnome-vfs-2.0
   libtelepathy >= 0.0.57
   libmissioncontrol >= 4.33
   gtk+-2.0 >= 2.12.0
   libglade-2.0 >= 2.0.0
   libgnomeui-2.0
   libebook-1.2
   libpanelapplet-2.0 >= 2.10.0

* Resource usage: Already using GNOME FTP, GNOME SVN and GNOME bugzilla.

* Adoption: It is packaged at least for debian, ubuntu, mandriva, gentoo
and fedora. It is used by Intel for the moblin [2] platform. There is
patches for Totem and nautilus-send-to [3] to make use of
libempathy(-gtk). Someone was working on integration in gtetrinet but I
don't know the status of that work. There is also an epiphany plugin
[4]. Work was being done for GSoC to integrate Empathy into Jockosher
[5]. Empathy is also used by Soylent [6].

* GNOME-ness: The community reports bugs in GNOME bugzilla and attach
patches, I review and commit in GNOME's SVN. Some i18n teams already
started to commit translations. I take care of usability thanks to loads
of usability bugs opened by Vincent Untz. User documentation is not
started yet, I guess we can pick gossip's doc and adapt it for Empathy
since the UI is almost the same.

* Miscellaneous:
 - There is patches to support File Transfer, Voice and Video. I think
it will be ready before GNOME 2.22 feature freeze.
 - Empathy is still a young project with some bugs but I'm pretty sure
we can fix them in time for GNOME 2.22.
 - At some point we'll have same features than Ekiga which is already in
GNOME desktop. The big advantage of Empathy is it uses Telepathy
framework which make easy for desktop integration and means we'll have
VoIP for all protocols (SIP, MSN, Jabber, etc). Empathy supports all IM
features (private chat, chatroom, presence, avatar, alias, etc), not
only Voice and Video. Ekiga don't have those advantages.

Thanks,
Xavier Claessens.

[1] http://live.gnome.org/Empathy
[2] http://www.moblin.org/projects_chat.html
[3] http://www.barisione.org/blog.html/p=100
[4] http://blog.senko.net/2007/07/19/emphatic-epiphany
[5] http://blog.mikeasoft.com/2007/05/07/jokosher-soc
[6] http://live.gnome.org/Soylent