Re: Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.22

[Ethan Osten <senoki gmail com>]

On Sun, 2007-09-23 at 17:31 -0500, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> I agree with your statement about developer allocation. But that's not
> what I mean. Inclusion in the official Gnome suite adds a certain
> level of additional credibility to a project. And while this is always
> good for the project in question, in this case, we would publicly be
> encouraging the fragmentation of the de facto Gnome desktop IM space.
> 
> Would the benefits of telepathy over libpurple outweigh the damage
> done to community coherancy? At this point, it seems that it would
> have a net negative effect on end user experience over the course of
> the next 2-3 years in the sense that two integratable IM projects
> would have competing teams of folks working on integrating said
> applications with the Gnome deskop applications. 
> 
> In practice, this means more work for module maintainers who have to
> accept patches from two different IM projects.

This isn't a choice between "Pidgin in GNOME" vs "Empathy/Telepathy in
GNOME." Pidgin, realistically, is never going to integrate deeply into
GNOME - that's just not their focus. Pidgin has to appeal not just to
GNOME, but to Windows users and to the KDE people who don't like Kopete.
Even if it were to be put into the GNOME stack, I'm not convinced that
it's designed such that deep integration would be possible. And the lack
of HIG compliance [1], external hosting, etc. make it (I think)
questionable whether GNOME would accept its integration even were such
an effort to be made.

Empathy, on the other hand, /can/ integrate deeply into GNOME, and wants
to. And the design of Telepathy makes it possible to do this in a way
that is largely agnostic to Empathy, and interoperable with both other
IM services and programs.

Further, saying 'yes' to Empathy doesn't mean "everyone just abandon
Pidgin." There was a Summer of Code Project for Pidgin [2] this summer
to create a Telepathy connection manager (another of the advantages of
Telepathy, mind) using libpurple, with a secondary goal that wasn't
started of allowing Pidgin to use Telepathy.

And there is the advantage that Telepathy is being used by KDE 4 [3] and
is a fd.o project, which means that this stuff should all work in KDE,
too.

Therefore, I don't think the question should be "is Empathy better than
Pidgin?" which gets us nowhere as long as Pidgin stays on its current
course, but "is Empathy useful enough to GNOME to include it?" Which is
another debate entirely, but a far more productive one.

1:
http://www.pidgin.im/~seanegan/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/reducing-tab-size.html
2: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Telepathy
3: http://decibel.kde.org/