Re: GNOME Chat/Empathy Status

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Thu, 2014-04-10 at 11:27 +0100, Michael Ikey Doherty wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-04-10 at 06:13 -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-04-09 at 20:12 +0100, Michael Ikey Doherty wrote:
> > 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.
> Yeah, pretty large changes by anyones reckoning.

Apparently not by the author's reckoning. :)

> > > 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?
> Well this is why I'm confused - I don't see why we're not just improving
> Empathy if its needed.

Agree.  But this is the nature of Open Source.  There are a *lot* of
Bunny Trails.  And creating something is fun, when you are the solo guy
you have complete freedom - so I understand the impulse.  On the flip
side I've been in FOSS for almost three decades - an enormous amount of
effort gets wasted on "simplified", "lite", blah-blah re-implementation
of things.  If "lite" it-just-does-x version of things were stripped
form indexes like FreshMeat they'd probably be 1/10th their current
size; and inevitably those projects die as at the end of the day "lite"
is not what people want - they want complete, works-well, and
integrated.  Lately the constellation of projects around GNOME seem to
be going through a season of abundant lite-ness projects.
 
> > > 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.
> +1

Yep.

> > 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].
> Well, that kinda is my take on it. Empathy has the mature codebase - it
> would seem most sense to make Empathy better, rather than starting out
> again for each subset of Telepathy support.

But people are free to do whatever they want.  It seems to me that
Empathy is a pretty healthy *mature* project.  Why someone would want to
make yet-another-nearly-identical-chat-interface ... you would have to
ask them?


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