Re: Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.22

[Dodji Seketeli <dodji seketeli org>]

On Sun, 23 Sep 2007 13:41:10 +0200,
Xavier Claessens <xclaesse gmail com> wrote :

> 
> Le dimanche 23 septembre 2007 à 13:24 +0200, Vincent Untz a écrit :
> > Le dimanche 23 septembre 2007, à 10:59 +0200, Xavier Claessens a
> > écrit :
> > >  - 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.
> > 
> > That's an interesting debate. Will the interface of empathy make it
> > easy to call phones & mobiles? I'm not quite sure ekiga and empathy
> > fill the same role.
> 
> We already have SIP implementation and I think it works on the N800.
> Empathy just lack of UI for voice/video calls but I'm working on that
> atm. I'm not sure telepathy-sofiasip and farshight are as complete as
> ekiga but I'm sure work is being done by nokia/collabora to improve
> that. I almost never used ekiga myself.

As I understand it, libempathy is a set of reusable widgets and
leverages on the telepathy framework.

That implies that nothing should prevent Ekiga from using
libempathy/telepathy at some point in the future when it is stable and
and has the necessary features.

Today, a lot of people are using Ekiga because it *works now* for
the softphone use cases.

SIP and H232 (yes people are still using that one) are complicated in
the sense that just claiming "supporting the specs" is not enough. You
really have to debug your implementation against the buggy behaviours
of the servers that are *already* out there in the real world.

In that respect, I think that Ekiga is way more mature today than
Empathy. Please correct me if I am wrong here.

Empathy/Telepathy does look really promising though and I think the
nice thing would be to see some kind of integration work going on at
some point. I mean, one could imagine some telepathy-opal initiative to
take place where necessary, or seeing Ekiga re-using some libempathy
stuff at some point.

Cheers,

-- 
Dodji Seketeli
http://www.seketeli.org/dodji