Re: Proposal: Gabber and gnome--

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Ali Abdin <ALIABDIN aucegypt edu> writes:

> On Mon, 4 Sep 2000, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
> 
> I disagree - The good thing about Gabber is that it has the possibility 
> to handle various IM protocols (i.e. Yahoo Pager, AIM, ICQ, Jabber, etc.) 
> All this is done server-side - i.e. you don't need to upgrade your client 
> when a new 'transport' is supported.

Yes, but I think including Gabber would constitute a sort of
endoresement of the Jabber protocol by GNOME.

> I see no reason why we currently have gnomeicu and not gabber (the only 
> 'issue' I have with gabber is that it doesn't have a panel applet (yes I 
> know about the tasklet or whatever its called)).

gnomeicu is not in GNOME 1.2 and no one has proposed adding it to
GNOME 1.4 so far. I would personally oppose any such proposal.
 
> It is probably not a good idea to include chat programs that only support 
> one protocol (because that would imply that GNOME 'endorses' that 
> protocol). As far as I can see Jabber is the only 'Free' protocol out 
> there (all the others have clients thanks to reverse-engineering). 

Gabber supports only one protocol directly though; the gateways to
other protocols are server-side. Other chat protocols support
server-side gateways too. I don't think GNOME should endorse the
Jabber protocol as the basis of the IM infrastructure unless the free
software community at large buys into that standard. As far as I know,
none of the distributions of GNOME out there include Gabber yet, so I
would tend to say that has not yet happened.
 
> Then again there is 'EveryBuddy' which supports multiple protocols - but 
> I do not advocate that because last I checked it didn't support any 
> 'Free' protocols (i.e. Jabber)

I cited at least three other free chat/IM protocols in my message and
I think EveryBuddy supports at least two of them (IRC and Zephyr).

 - Maciej