Re: Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.24

["Xavier Claessens" <xclaesse gmail com>]

Hello,

Here are news about Empathy. Biggest objections for inclusion were:
 - Empathy depends on libmissioncontrol-client which is LGPLv2.1-only: This situation won't change in time for GNOME 2.24, however this library will be deprecated probably during the 2.25 cycle in favor of a new spec and API in libtelepathy-glib which is LGPLv2.1+.
 - Empathy has no user manual: This is not true anymore[1], a manual is being written and is already included. It is far from complete but Milo Casagrande is working on it, help is needed to finish it in time I think.
 - libempathy and libempathy-gtk are GPL and not documented: We agreed that those libraries won't be proposed for the GNOME platform, never. They are proposed for experimental purpose in the DESKTOP. Useful bits of libempathy(-gtk) will be moved to libtelepathy-glib and (probably new) libtelepathy-gtk once they are API stable, documented and LGPL. Most parts potentially useful for telepathy-glib are already LGPL, the rest could be rewritten or licencing change will be asked if/when needed. libtelepathy-glib is fully documented[2].
 - Passwords are stored in gconf: This is not true anymore, if libmissioncontrol-client is build with libgnome-keyring passwords are stored in the keyring and not in gconf anymore. If you upgrade MC from a previous version make sure to retype the password of every account to be sure they are removed from gconf and added to the keyring.

Notes: 
 - libtelepathy is now deprecated an empathy do not depend on it anymore, replaced by libtelepathy-glib
 - libempathy and libempathy-gtk are only continence API to make easy to write applications, but everything can be done through DBus so it's totally licence-independent.

[1] http://library.gnome.org/users/empathy/unstable/
[2] http://library.gnome.org/devel/telepathy-glib/unstable/


I hope this will help the adoption of Empathy for GNOME 2.24.

Xavier Claessens.

2008/3/25 Xavier Claessens <xclaesse gmail com>:

* Proposal: Include Empathy in GNOME 2.24 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 >= 2.16.0
 gconf-2.0 >= 1.2.0
 libxml-2.0
 libtelepathy >= 0.3.2
 telepathy-glib >= 0.7.3
 libmissioncontrol >= 4.53
 gtk+-2.0 >= 2.12.0
 libglade-2.0 >= 2.0.0
 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. There is patches for Totem and nautilus-send-to [2] to make
use of libempathy(-gtk). There is a gtetrinet branch which uses
libempathy-gtk to play with contacts. There is also a python plugin for
epiphany using pyempathygtk [3]. Empathy is also used by Soylent [4].

* GNOME-ness: The community reports bugs in GNOME bugzilla and attach
patches, I review and commit in GNOME's SVN. GNOME translation teams are
already translating empathy. The UI is build with GNOME spirit in mind,
empathy inherit from Gossip's excellent UI.

* Miscellaneous:
 - Audio/Video support is still disabled by default but most problems
comes from other telepathy layers and are being worked. I'm pretty sure
it will be enabled soon. That means Empathy will be able to do
audio/video calls over SIP and Jabber, MSN will surely come at some
point too. Empathy is the only program capable of that AFAIK.
 - libtelepathy is now deprecated, empathy is moving to telepathy-glib.
If we finish the transition we'll drop libtelepathy dependency.
 - Empathy's part for file-transfer is almost done, but the telepathy
spec is likely to change soon. I hope it will be ready in time for 2.24.
 - API is still not documented and likely to change, I know this sucks.
 - There is no user documentation yet, I'll write an email to ask
documentation team to write one base on Gossip's doc.
 - Empathy was proposed for GNOME 2.22 but got rejected because it was
not considered stable/mature enough. Lots is already fixed and I hope to
fix more during the 6 months coming. Help from the community is of
course welcome!

Thanks,
Xavier Claessens.

[1] http://live.gnome.org/Empathy
[2] http://www.barisione.org/blog.html/p=100
[3] http://blog.senko.net/2007/07/19/emphatic-epiphany
[4] http://live.gnome.org/Soylent