Re: Proposed module: empathy

["Jason D. Clinton" <me jasonclinton com>]

On 12/20/07, Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org> wrote:

Le jeudi 20 décembre 2007, à 17:12 -0600, Jason D. Clinton a écrit :
> What happened to the discussion about blessed dependency on Telepathy and
> friends?

Sorry, I don't understand. The telepathy dependency is mentioned in the
mail you replied to, so you can discuss it in this thread. The mail even
mentioned "a few -1 from people ... or not wanting to use telepathy"

I'm referring to the gigantic thread about Empathy in which only tiny amount of discussion was about Telepathy. My point is that Telepathy should be the focus of any discussion, not Empathy per-se.

I was not trying to imply that somehow the release team had missed this; I read the email.

> I've already made my concerns about Empathy well-known so I will
> not repeat them here, but what I think is far more important to discuss is
> why telepathy should or should not be a part of the Gnome desktop experience
> out of the box. In the games module, for instance, there will be pressure to
> launch multi-player games from and over telepathy. I'm sure other module
> maintainers will feel the same kinds of pressures to implement this
> additional interface.

Correct me if I'm wrong (I had to read between the lines because you
don't explicitly mention what you mean): you mean you don't want
telepathy to be part of our desktop experience out of the box, and
you're afraid people will push a telepathy dependency in gnome-games
(and also other modules)?

I didn't say that I don't want Telepathy in. It's no secret that I don't like Empathy but I DO like the goals of Telepathy. I just happen to think that Empathy is a poor implementation of a Telepathy client. My question above is entirely intended to start a discussion about **Telepathy** being pro-actively (or not) promoted throughout the project. I'm looking for anyone to offer some opinions about this and (hopefully) some kind of goals.

At some point in the previous discussion, Jeff mentioned how well "telepathy fits in to the Topaz vision" (paraphrasing). Well, ok. Who's vision of Topaz and where is this master document? And when were the rest of us going to this a memo about this glorious vision?

In summary, the decision about Empathy, as I see it, is going to directly influence the future of our project's "networked-ness". I'd like to know who's steering the ship (foundation doesn't appear to be) and exactly where we are going. Not so I can complain--not at all. So I can plan! There appears to be no clear articulation of these nebulous ideas, at this point. (The live.g.o pages about Topaz are practically empty.)

Well. I didn't check the libempathy API, but my understanding is that
you wouldn't see telepathy, but just libempathy. And if we accept
empathy, it makes sense (at least to me) to integrate it wherever it's
useful. If it helps improve the user experience for multi-player games,
isn't this a feature you'd want to see?

That seems backwards from the way I see it; I don't see why I would send game I/O over to Empathy to have it pass the data on to Telepathy when I can just talk to Telepathy directly...

Also, you seem to imply that empathy is going in to Platform in the future? Telepathy I can see, but why Empathy? Wouldn't that be an unnecessary layer of abstraction?
 

> So in summary, WTF is Telepathy and Topaz and why should I care? (Or for the
> tin-foil-hat brigade: why does Nokia/Collabora care about this so much?)

Why do you mention Nokia or Collabora? Okay, I can understand
Collabora since many telepathy developers are Collabora people -- I'm
still left wondering about Nokia. And we're talking about a technology
here, not who's doing it.

Nokia => libmissioncontrol
 

Is there any important issue with telepathy?

 From the previous threads, it didn't seem very likely the Gossip devs would relicense... But that's for them to say for themselves.