On Fri, 2017-08-25 at 15:34 +0200, Alexandre Franke wrote:
On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 2:05 PM, David Woodhouse <dwmw2 infradead org> wrote:But isn't that the *point*? We have a framework with plugins for all manner of different protocols, instead of a mess of separate protocol- specific clients each of which can handle only *one*.When the choice is given to me between sticking to an abstraction that tries but doesn’t manage to grasp the quirks of several protocols, or switching to a protocol specific API and embrace it to make sure it is correctly and fully supported, I pick the latter. Even if I have to do it twice or more. I don’t think the *point* should be to support several protocols badly.
That's very true, and I don't think you're wrong to want a Matrix- specific UI which doesn't attempt to use Telepathy at all. I'm just nitpicking that this isn't a "replacement for Telepathy"; it's rightly ditching Telepathy and just doing your own protocol-specific thing. It's slightly suboptimal for *me* because I'm working on protocol support for Yet Another IM Protocol, as well as occasionally still prodding at the siplcs Lync support, and really don't want to live in a world where each protocol needs to put together its *own* GUI to support it specifically. Right now I'm building my toy as a Pidgin/libpurple plugin but not because I particularly like Pidgin; I think it's fairer to say that I just hate libpurple less than I hate everything *else*. It also has the impedance mismatches and doesn't support some of the things I need like persistent editable messages, read receipts, multi-way V/V calls with indication of who's speaking at any given moment, etc... but it *could* be added...
I also don’t think we should aim at supporting all the protocols that exist. I don’t think a single client can map to the features of all of them.
Just because it's been done badly/incompletely that doesn't mean it's impossible.
If someone cares enough to implement support for a protocol in Telepathy, they could probably implement support for the protocol elsewhere too.
But where is "elsewhere"? If not libpurple, where *should* I be adding support for my new toy protocol for example? If you've just taken your ball and gone home...
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