Re: Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.24

[Denis Washington <dwashington gmx net>]

On Wed, 2008-03-26 at 19:13 +0100, Xavier Claessens wrote:
> Ok so I summarize so far here are objections:

A nice summary. I hope this gets the discussion more streamlined. I'm
also not in a deciding position (only a occasional GNOME contributor),
these are just my 0.02¢.

> 1) libmissioncontrol is LGPLv2-only
> That's a problem and it won't re relicenced. However it will be droped
> at some point and replaced by a dbus API that we'll access via
> telepathy-glib which is LGPLv2+. This is only a problem if GNOME wants
> to move to GPLv3 and it won't happen soon, I'm pretty sure empathy
> won't use libmissioncontrol sooner.

I think we should view this issue as resolved then, libmissioncontrol
really doesn't need to be relicensed IMO.

> 2) libempathy and libempathy-gtk are GPL
> This is only a problem if we want them in the plateform. Currently
> it's proposed for the desktop so it's not a problem yet. It will be a
> problem when we want to move them in the plateform. If I see
> copyrights in GPL headers of all Empathy files I see Imendio+Collabora
> +some personal that are ok to relicence. We have to contact all other
> "little" contributors but I think those are not a real obstacle if we
> ask on gossip's mailing list + grap emails in the changelog. The
> problem here is mostly imendio who owns most of libempathy-gtk.

Fair enough, but as the best place for empathy would ultimately be the
platform (being usable by any application is the whole point of it's
framework-like architecture after all), the (L)GPL issue is also
important before empathy can be included to desktop. Even if that
inclusion is no problem from a legal stand point, I think many are
simply not happy with the idea of being stuck with a communication
framework that maybe never can be put into the platform where it
belongs. to the platform. There were already comments in the line of
"relicensing won't ever happened" which express this concern.

Therefore, I believe the best would if be you re(started) a relicensing
effort.to get the relicensing effort rolling before you continue the
discussion, possibly starting with Imendio or another big contributor.
This will get you more confidence from the GNOME community than pretty
much everything else. It is not that important that you get the
relicensing done quickly IMO; what counts is some kind of _progress_, to
show that you care about the opponent's concerns and are doing something
about the issue, and that there is a visible chance of being able to
relicense the complete code. I strongly believe that empathy has a
dramatically higher chance to be included that way.

> 3) API documentation is empty.
> Yes that's a real problem that needs to be fixed and it will take
> time. It was an objection last time and it didn't improve. I would
> appreciate help here even if I know I'm the best one to write doc of
> the API I wrote...

Same applies here. Do the first move, start on improving the
documentation, at least in some parts. If you have real progress to
show, it is much easier to believe that this task can be finished until
2.24, and more importantly, that you _do something_ about the criticism.

> 4) various user problems for missing feature X, Y
> I think this is a minor issue, features can be added later. GNOME
> doesn't have an IM client so missing features in Empathy are not
> regressions.

I second that.

> 5) Overall stability
> That got lot of improvements since last time and is the major point we
> should focus to accept or reject Empathy. I think most of bugs are
> easy to fix and only need more help from the community to report bugs
> and propose patches. This is different from point 4 even if both are
> reported using bugzilla.

This is no blocker for inclusion IMO. Stability can be easily increased
in the course of one release cycle; especially when your proposal is
accepted, more developers are likely to help.

So, as I said, I think currently the main problem is a lack of visible
progress in comparison to the 2.22 discussion. I really recommend you to
work on the two main issues, especially the legal situation, and show us
what you have archived and are planning to do. I think this will show
your quality as a maintainer which listens to concerns and tries to work
on them, and it would make us all more comfortable with accepting
empathy to the GNOME desktop. 

Regards,
Denis Washington