Re: Matrix as a replacement for Telepathy






-- 
Matthew Hodgson
On 25 Aug 2017, at 12:46, Felipe Borges <felipeborges gnome org> wrote:

On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 12:15 AM, Alejandro HC <haevalencia gmail com> wrote:
A comment as a user. Since Empathy ceased to be maintained, there has been
little concern for the communication system that is available in gnome
focused to end user (gnome-polari is targeted to IRC which is mostly used by
developer communities).

Matrix is great, but I feel it points to the same, so why not support GNU
Ring in GNOME ... Ring is a project that aims to be a free replacement for
Skype, in addition already has a good integration in gnome and it's easy to
use, offering its own communication protocol it offers support for SIP.

Telepathy was designed as a framework which could have various
"Connection Managers" (in the telepathy terminology). A Connection
Manager is responsible of doing the actual communication with a given
server through a given protocol. Telepathy has connection managers for
XMPP, SIP, IRC, etc... see [0]. For instance, Polari uses Telepathy
for the IRC protocol.

Folks have looked at building a telepathy connection manager for Matrix in the past (starting with https://github.com/gergelypolonkai/matrix-glib-sdk and working outwards), but rapidly hit major impedance mismatches with telepathy's API which sadly dates back to a simpler age of IRCv2 and 1st generation IM apps like ICQ or MSN.

From memory, the sort of modern features which Matrix has which the API doesn't handle include:

 * Infinite scrollback serverside history
 * Synced history across multiple devices
 * Server side search
 * Server side notification settings 
 * Read receipts
 * Read-up-to markers
 * Multiway voip
 * Promoting 1:1s to group chats and vice versa
 * Native end-to-end encryption (verifying keys, devices, sharing keys, etc)
 * Encrypted file transfers
 * Redacted msgs

 And upcoming shortly:
 * Reactions / upvotes / downvotes 
 * Editable msgs
 * Pinned messages
 * Threading

So, the choices are either to build a new version of telepathy with that sort of featureset, or build something new which exposes Matrix's API via Dbus or similar. One could then use local or remote bridges to other protocols (or follow the "connection mgr" pattern to implement them locally, but given that would barely be using Matrix at all it's not really our focus).

M


All in all, if desirable, Matrix and GNU Ring could be connection
managers in Telepathy instead of standalone bits.

Specific clients could be created backed by Telepathy, e.g. no need to
rely on Empathy.

[0] https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/components/
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