Re: Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.22

["Jason D. Clinton" <me jasonclinton com>]

On 9/23/07, Travis Reitter <treitter-dev netdrain com> wrote:

I read the thread - I just responded in general. But let me get a little
more specific:

>From my own perspective, I would describe the three "competing"
applications as:

Empathy is a general communications program based around Telepathy, and
meant to be well-integrated into Gnome.

 

...

The main benefit here is that Telepathy is a plugin-based general
communications stack which has a lot of community and commercial support
and in my (and many other peoples') opinion a well-designed framework
which is increasingly polished and increasingly-relevant to Gnome.

Because Empathy builds on Telepathy, instead of building its own silo, I
don't think it's fair to call it a "duplication of effort". And I'd say
that the Empathy/Telepathy stack is certainly worth inclusion in Gnome
when we all decide it's polished enough.

I'm not against Telepathy per se.
I'm not sure that Empathy is the right way to get it in to Gnome,
though. At least at this moment. Let me summarize the concerns that I
see so far:

 * It appears to be a fork of Gossip and intended to replace
Gossip. The Gossip author has stated that Gossip is not dead. Gossip
has telepathy support...
 * It appears to want to replace Ekiga. There appears to be no buy-in from Ekiga developers.
 * It appears to want to replace the default IM client installed in distros (Pidgin).
 * Poor documentation status (could be fixed)
 * It doesn't implement all of the features it lists as its benefits. (maybe could be fixed by 
2.22 release)