Re: Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.22

[Robert McQueen <robert mcqueen collabora co uk>]

Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> I've been diving deeper in to the code involved here and the more I see the
> more I dislike. Xavier, it seems that you implemented gossip-telepathy and
> then forked Gossip to create Empathy? Can you provide some history for us
> please? What is going on here?

Various people were involved in adding Telepathy support to Gossip,
particularly started off by Eitan Isaacs and continued a lot by Xavier,
as well as support from the Gossip upstream. We reached a point where if
we'd continued the integration work between Gossip and Telepathy
(particularly integrating Mission Control which would take over storing
account configuration and controlling presence) it had the risk of
destabilising or degrading Gossip's functionality as a stand-alone
dedicated XMPP client.

After some discussions on the Gossip IRC channel we agreed that given
the relatively unproven nature of the Telepathy framework on the
desktop, and the dedication of Gossip to just XMPP until this point,
that the required refactoring and changes weren't an acceptable risk for
the Gossip developers to take. I totally respect that decision, and
there's nothing hostile in the decision to branch Empathy development
away from Gossip; it was agreed on both sides and I'm very happy to see
Gossip development continuing happily as an XMPP client, and to see that
we were able to re-use the excellent UI code to form a solid basis for
the Empathy widgets as well.

Regards,
Rob