Re: Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.22

["Lucas Rocha" <lucasr gnome org>]

Hi Xavier,

(I'm replying your original message because I think most of the
discussion went through some weird and non-productive paths).

IMHO, Empathy is definitely the way to go for a GNOME-wide solution
for real-time communication because instead of proposing a new
application, you're doing a framework which will allow us to integrate
this whole thing to the desktop in a consistent and powerful way.

Also, it uses Telepathy which is where most of the efforts in
real-time communication are going in the free software world. It's
flexible, extensible and powerful.

I have some concerns though:

- I really miss more use cases or plans (some of them should/could be
implemented for 2.22 already) that could make Empathy be more
integrated to the desktop. Some examples/suggestions:
  1. Integrate messenger account settings into the "About me" applet
  2. Plugins to Epiphany, Gedit, Eye of GNOME, Rhythmbox, etc which
allow users to easily share media and content with their friends.
  3. An optional "People" menu in the menu bar panel applet which
gives users access to contacts and other communication tasks. I think
this would make a lot of sense because we already have macro-topics
there: "Applications", "Places", "System" and now... "People"!

- In the other hand, we need to be careful to not make Empathy a hard
UI dependency in way that distros cannot choose to not use it and pick
one of the usual instant messenger out there. In the mid-term, I'm
sure the results of integrating Empathy everywhere in the desktop will
be so cool that distros will just use it by default. But still...

- Documentation is missing (as others already mentioned).

So, this is my +1 for Empathy. :-)

--lucasr


2007/9/23, Xavier Claessens <xclaesse gmail com>:
> Hi,
>
> * Proposal: Include Empathy in GNOME 2.22 desktop.
>
> * Purpose: Empathy [1] 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.
>
> * Dependencies:
>    glib-2.0 >= 2.14.0
>    gconf-2.0 >= 1.2.0
>    libxml-2.0
>    gnome-vfs-2.0
>    libtelepathy >= 0.0.57
>    libmissioncontrol >= 4.33
>    gtk+-2.0 >= 2.12.0
>    libglade-2.0 >= 2.0.0
>    libgnomeui-2.0
>    libebook-1.2
>    libpanelapplet-2.0 >= 2.10.0
>
> * Resource usage: Already using GNOME FTP, GNOME SVN and GNOME bugzilla.
>
> * Adoption: It is packaged at least for debian, ubuntu, mandriva, gentoo
> and fedora. It is used by Intel for the moblin [2] platform. There is
> patches for Totem and nautilus-send-to [3] to make use of
> libempathy(-gtk). Someone was working on integration in gtetrinet but I
> don't know the status of that work. There is also an epiphany plugin
> [4]. Work was being done for GSoC to integrate Empathy into Jockosher
> [5]. Empathy is also used by Soylent [6].
>
> * GNOME-ness: The community reports bugs in GNOME bugzilla and attach
> patches, I review and commit in GNOME's SVN. Some i18n teams already
> started to commit translations. I take care of usability thanks to loads
> of usability bugs opened by Vincent Untz. User documentation is not
> started yet, I guess we can pick gossip's doc and adapt it for Empathy
> since the UI is almost the same.
>
> * Miscellaneous:
>  - There is patches to support File Transfer, Voice and Video. I think
> it will be ready before GNOME 2.22 feature freeze.
>  - Empathy is still a young project with some bugs but I'm pretty sure
> we can fix them in time for GNOME 2.22.
>  - 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.
>
> Thanks,
> Xavier Claessens.
>
> [1] http://live.gnome.org/Empathy
> [2] http://www.moblin.org/projects_chat.html
> [3] http://www.barisione.org/blog.html/p=100
> [4] http://blog.senko.net/2007/07/19/emphatic-epiphany
> [5] http://blog.mikeasoft.com/2007/05/07/jokosher-soc
> [6] http://live.gnome.org/Soylent
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> desktop-devel-list mailing list
> desktop-devel-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
>