Re: Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.22

[Robert McQueen <robert mcqueen collabora co uk>]

Dodji Seketeli wrote:
> As I understand it, libempathy is a set of reusable widgets and
> leverages on the telepathy framework.
> 
> That implies that nothing should prevent Ekiga from using
> libempathy/telepathy at some point in the future when it is stable and
> and has the necessary features.
> 
> Today, a lot of people are using Ekiga because it *works now* for
> the softphone use cases.
> 
> SIP and H232 (yes people are still using that one) are complicated in
> the sense that just claiming "supporting the specs" is not enough. You
> really have to debug your implementation against the buggy behaviours
> of the servers that are *already* out there in the real world.
> 
> In that respect, I think that Ekiga is way more mature today than
> Empathy. Please correct me if I am wrong here.

Right on all counts. Personally my interest in seeing Empathy integrated
into GNOME is not for any VOIP or SIP functionality, which is very
immature at the moment in the upper levels (the SoC UI stuff isn't
merged yet, and the underlying stream engine is in need of some TLC to
make it less wedded to the Nokia internet tablet devices), it's to
enable other applications to build on top of the Telepathy framework to
integrate IM, presence and collaborative functions into other apps in
the desktop.

> Empathy/Telepathy does look really promising though and I think the
> nice thing would be to see some kind of integration work going on at
> some point. I mean, one could imagine some telepathy-opal initiative to
> take place where necessary, or seeing Ekiga re-using some libempathy
> stuff at some point.

I agree, I'd love to see this. I guess I've been quite remiss thus far
because I've not really had much interaction with Ekiga developers to
discuss the prospects for co-operation and integration. A Telepathy opal
backend makes a lot of sense, as does using the familiar Ekiga interface
to allow users to take advantage of Telepathy functionality which isn't
currently available in Ekiga (such as XMPP calling perhaps?).

> Cheers,

Regards,
Rob