Re: GNOME Chat/Empathy Status

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Wed, 2014-04-09 at 20:12 +0100, Michael Ikey Doherty wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-04-09 at 15:06 -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-04-09 at 13:27 +0100, Michael Ikey Doherty wrote:
> > > More interestingly I discover they are 2 separate things - that throws
> > > even more questions into the mix. I'll leave it at this for now:
> > > Why 2 separate chat applications? Why not merge and fix within Empathy?
> > > Or the other way around.
> > Because two people wanted to create chat apps... it is really that
> > simple.  And Pidgin is older and cross platform.  Empathy uses the
> > Telepathy backend and is about integration with the GNOME stack.
> So what's the plan for gnome-chat?

Only the developer would know.  But the article states - " didn’t
receive any major developing, just a few bugs and translation updates
-apart from GDBus implementation and ChatManager API."  To me, that
seems like a pretty darn significant "apart from" - it is about changing
the architecture of the app.  Empathy is pretty complete/mature, I
wouldn't expect a hack-ton of stuff happening on the code base.  This
looks like automation/completeness stuff being added to a mature
project.

The author says " Empathy is a really important part of GNOME, but
definitely not as it is." which is a rather worthless statement.  "as it
is"?  What does that mean.  Does he have issues with the application?
What he displays in the screenshot of GNOME Chat looks almost exactly
like Empathy.  I use Empathy all day for both XMPP and IRC, it works.

> I ask because the wogue article, no
> other reason. It makes it appear as if gnome-chat is completely dead (My
> confusion was that I thought gnome-chat and empathy were to be merged,
> apparently not :))

I suppose you could get something like an `official word` on emphathy's
IRC channel.  With two projects words like "merged" don't actually mean
anything.  Is that code, or ideas, or interface design, or the third
icon to the left on the top?

> I'm talking about Empathy + gnome-chat, not Empathy and pidgin. Also,
> does Polari now affect the status of gnome-chat?

Polari is specifically an IRC client.  There have been stand alone IRC
clients since ... well, forever.  I do not see an enumeration of what it
offers over Empathy.

Honestly, for me, I just don't see the point in gnome-chat or Polari...
why not just contribute to Empathy?  But this is Open Source, people can
do what they want, and what works for them.  There are a lot of projects
other people don't see the point of.  This is both a strength and a
weakness of Open Source [a lot of ideas get to make it on the field,
sometimes it is difficult for a good idea to accrue significant mass,
and you always have people posting screenshots of barely working apps
claiming to have invented something new].

-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <mailto:awilliam whitemice org> GPG D95ED383
Systems Administrator, Python Developer, LPI / NCLA