Re: Proposed module: empathy

[Xavier Claessens <xclaesse gmail com>]

Le lundi 28 juillet 2008 à 00:31 +0200, Vincent Untz a écrit :
> Homepage: http://live.gnome.org/Empathy
> svn/git/bzr/...: http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/empathy/
You can also use git://git.collabora.co.uk/git/empathy.git

> 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.

A SoC student is working on this, I hope we can improve it for 2.25.x,
but 2.24 will get little bug fixes only.

> Some update about those items (correct me if I'm wrong):
>  + about features & stability: feedback is welcome. Xavier will
>    probably send an update.

New features:
 - Audio/Video call is now enabled by default. The UI improved a bit but
there is still loooots of work needed to get it right. However
audio/video works with SIP (video is not compatible with ekiga for codec
reasons) and Jabber (audio is compatible with gtalk). Empathy also now
supports DTMF signals so you can answer when a voice tell you "Pour
continuer en français, appuiez sur le 1. For English, press two.".
 - User manual started, but it is far from complete... Help is needed!
 - libgnome-vfs is totally replaced by gio.
 - Support for MSN-like chats that becomes suddenly a chatroom when
someone gets invited.
 - Register new account for protocols which supports that like Jabber.
 - Passwords are stored in keyring.
 - Add Tube support. See this page for more info how you can make use of
Tubes for your application: http://live.gnome.org/Empathy/Dispatcher

For future plans see http://live.gnome.org/Empathy/Roadmap

>  + the keyring is now used (afaik).
If you are using recent MissionControl, yes.

>  + 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).

libempathy and libempathy-gtk are proposed as public API for
experimental work only. Those 2 libraries will NEVER be proposed for
inclusion in GNOME platform. There is no rule requiring libraries of the
DESKTOP to be API-stable(except for freezes), fully documented API and
LGPLv2+. If that's still a problem we can just make those 2 libraries
private and link statically the empathy client on them but that would be
a big lost for projects who already started integrating IM capabilities.

Please consider inclusion of Empathy as a stand-alone IM client.
Integration possibilities are already possible for experimental stuff
and will mature in the future.

The plan comes in 2 steps:
1) Reduce the need of additional high-level library by improving the
Telepathy spec. Collabora is actively working on simplifying the spec
atm.

2) Add more high-level API in libtelepathy-glib when needed.
libtelepathy-glib is a LGPLv2+ and 100% documented library, any
additional code must follow that rule. For that we'll either write new
code or copy LGPL code from libempathy. An important fact here is
lot/most of the API of libemapthy is not really needed for third party
clients and most of the useful parts is already LGPLv2+.

For libemapthy-gtk things are a bit more complicated because most of the
code comes from Gossip and is GPLv2+. But again not all widgets are
really useful for third-party clients. We are planning to create
libtelepathy-gtk library following the same rules than
libtelepathy-glib.

Note: The work already started, latest libtelepathy-glib release has
code to help using the Group interface which deprecates EmpathyTpGroup
object from libempathy.

Xavier Claessens.