Am Dienstag, den 25.03.2008, 18:44 +0200 schrieb Felipe Contreras: > Pidgin is not part of GNOME, neither is XChat. > > So currently there's no IM/chat solution for GNOME. Yes, GNOME lacks an __official__ IM/chat solution. So far that hole has been filled by Pidgin and XChat. > > I definitely do not want to run and maintain two different IM > > applications on my computer (implicitly Telepathy/Empathy due GNOME > > desktop integration[1], and Pidgin for its limited, but still superior > > IRC support). > > You are free to use irssi, or emulate mIRC with Wine. That is up to you. Stay on-topic please. > AFAIK GNOME doesn't recommend the usage of Pidgin, so it's better to > fully support Empathy than nothing at all. GNOME itself doesn't, so 3rd-party applications have to fill the gap. Currently Pidgin fills the gap for a GNMOEish IM solution. From an user's perspective it does a reasonable job. It looks relatively polished. It supports many protocols with a good feature set. By making Empathy an official GNOME component, we tell all our users, that Pidgin is legacy and that they should switch to our superior solution. As good engineers we would have integrated Pidgin, if our solution wouldn't be much superior. Sadly users have no chance to recognize our solution as superior, when important features - like IRC buddy lists - are missing. The fact that Telepathy features a well-thought DBus API is absolutely not interesting for users. By pushing Empathy too early we'd just knowingly repeat the really sad Epiphany vs. Firefox story. FOSS users are critical users. They don't believe that a solution is superior, just because some marketing druid is saying so. We have to convince our users by facts. Shipping applications that lack important features is not very convincing. IMHO it would be stupid for current IRC users to replace their current IRC application with Empathy at this moment. Its IRC support just is not ready yet. This can be fixed - of course. Ciao, Mathias -- Mathias Hasselmann <mathias hasselmann gmx de> http://taschenorakel.de/mathias/about/
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