Proposed module: empathy

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Homepage: http://live.gnome.org/Empathy
svn/git/bzr/...: http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/empathy/
Proposal on d-d-l: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2008-March/msg00196.html
License: GPLv2 or later (I believe)

Short description:
==================
Empathy 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.

Requires new external dependencies:
===================================
libtelepathy-glib and libmissioncontrol-client
(libmissioncontrol-client will disappear during the next cycle)

Summary so far:
===============
 + (would be nice to get an overview of what has changed since 2.22
   proposal -- I believe Xavier will send something about this)
 + hosted on the GNOME infrastructure
 + following the GNOME release schedule
 + supported by many people, but a few -1 were sent too
 + lots of discussion about the licensing issues: people really want
   the libraries to be LGPL. See below for details/updates about this.
 + comments about bad support for IRC, but also feelings that this
   shouldn't block the inclusion.
 + no good documentation for the libraries (although see the updates
   below)

Reminder of the 2.22 decision:
==============================
  - great goals
  - more work is needed to add some features, and make it a bit more
    stable (especially since people are used to something working very
    well for IM), and probably add a bit more integration if possible
  - (some people would really like the keyring to be used)
  - would really be great to fix the licensing for the libraries since,
    at some point, we might want to push the libraries in the platform
  - we encourage to propose it again for 2.24
  => reject

Some update about those items (correct me if I'm wrong):
 + about features & stability: feedback is welcome. Xavier will
   probably send an update.
 + the keyring is now used (afaik).
 + I believe that the plan is to slowly move the empathy libraries into
   telepathy and that code might get rewritten for this because of LGPL
   needs. "Only" a promise so far, though. This might mean we should
   only consider the empathy application for inclusion (and try to
   forget about libraries).

Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.