Re: GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.3.0: "Mighty Atom"

["John (J5) Palmieri" <johnp martianrock com>]

On Sat, 2003-04-12 at 11:41, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Daniel Farrell">
> 
> > Email
> > Web Browsing
> > Instant Messaging
> > Audio playing(and video is catching up)
> 
> (I pretty much agree.)
> 
> > We should keep the basic desktop in plain view.  Are there any reasons
> > Gaim shouldn't be including in the basic desktop?
> 
> IMHO, Gaim does not integrate brilliantly with GNOME [1], and certainly
> doesn't follow the HIG. I'm not sure the developers are willing to commit to
> the goals of the GNOME Desktop release, either.
I was one of the devlopers of the applet for Gnome 1.0 and got the ball
rolling for the 2.0 notification plugin.  At issue here is that most of
the developers want to keep Gaim a GTK+ app and add Gnome functionality
through plugins and external scripts. The nofication applet was a god
send to the developers because they could strip out all the #ifdefs and
gnome code while making the application work in KDE as well as Gnome
through the notification area plugin. This also allowed the debian
packager to maintain one package instead of teh confusing and often time
conflicting gaim and gaim-gnome packages.  As far as I can see it
integrates great into Gnome.  If there are concerns they should be
brought up on the gaim-devel list. Athough I personly do not do much
coding on Giam these days I would be interested in hearing how it can be
made to integrate better with Gnome.   

> I would love to see a yummy, HIGgy, usable instant messaging app included in
> the Desktop release, even though I don't use them. ;-)

> (One issue with IM stuff is that we can't rely on proprietary protocols and
> servers working, and to satisfy a large majority of the users, we'd really
> be wanting to support them... So, kind of a tough position.)
While Gaim was created to be an AIM clone it does many different
protocols today.  This includes IRC and Jabber which are both open
protocols.

As for making a Higgy IM client, from my understanding there is work
underway that would split the UI from the core and this would make it
possible to make a more Gnome complient IM.  Of course they are just
finninshing up the Gtk 2.0 port which was more important.  

--
J5  

> - Jeff
> 
> [1] It has options for things that GNOME defines, has a bunch of copied
> code, does not use GNOME libraries, etc.