Re: Proposed module: empathy

[Xavier Claessens <xclaesse gmail com>]

On jeu, 2007-12-20 at 04:52 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote:
> Homepage: http://live.gnome.org/Empathy
> svn/git/bzr/...: http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/empathy/
> Proposal on d-d-l: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2007-September/msg00301.html
> 
> Short description:
> ==================
> Empathy 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.
> 
> Requires new external dependencies:
> ===================================
> libtelepathy, telepathy-glib, libmissioncontrol
> (libtelepathy will go away at some point in the future)
> 
> Summary so far:
> ===============
>  + a few -1 from people thinking it's useless duplication of
>    pidgin/ekiga/etc. work or not wanting to use telepathy
>  + some +1 from people thinking it's going the right way
>  + questions about stability
>  + questions about feature set that might not be complete yet
>  + API documentation needed to be written (I don't know the
>    current status)
>  + no API stability guarantee yet
>  + current license of the libraries is GPL
>    [context: if the libraries are proposed for the platform later, they
>    will need to be LGPL]
> 
> Xavier can probably send an update about the feature set, the API doc
> status, and the license.

I changed license to LGPL for modules I wrote myself or for Collabora.
For the rest I need Gossip devs's permission.

About feature set I think we have most needed stuff. VoIP is now merged
in trunk but disabled by default at build-time because it still needs
some love. I doubt File transfer will be ready in time, the code is
ready but it needs to be reviewed: Telepathy spec is not yet approved.

API is still not documented and not stable. We are working on a new
MissionControl spec, when it will be ready empathy will use it and
surely that will break the API again. I'm not proposing libempathy and
libempathy-gtk for the platform, I propose Empathy as an IM client for
the desktop so I think the API don't have to be stable. Of course I
agree it's better to have a stable API for other programs that could use
empathy's libraries but it's still to early to guarantee that.

Xavier Claessens.