GNOME Online Accounts 3.30 won't have Telepathy support

[Debarshi Ray <rishi is lostca se>]

Hello everybody,

As we start the 3.27.x / 3.28 development cycle with this week's
3.27.1 release, I'd like to notify you that I want to remove the
Telepathy integration from GNOME Online Accounts in another 6 months
starting from 3.29.1. Stated differently, when GNOME 3.30 gets
released in the autumn of 2018, the Telepathy provider will be gone
from GOA.

The Telepathy provider was disabled by default during the previous
development cycle, version 3.25.3 to be precise, and it will continue
to remain so during the 3.27.x / 3.28 cycle.

The Empathy / Telepathy stack is no longer as strongly maintained as
it used to be, and the consensus in GNOME is to deprecate it.
Moreover, the Telepathy integration in GOA doesn't actually buy the
user any benefits. The original plan was to disable Empathy's own
account management UI (ie. empathy-accounts), but that never happened.
So, we ended up with two UIs, which at times had slightly divergent
behaviour - Microsoft account added via OAuth2 / XMPP versus raw
passwords / legacy pre-XMPP protocol.

These days we have Polari, which also has its own accounts UI, which
is in keeping with its status as a non-core application.

Internally, the code isn't architected as a generic chat provider with
relatively light dependencies, as is the case for most of the other
providers in GOA. It really is targetted for Telepathy only, and works
as a two-way bridge between two account management systems instead of
being strictly acyclic. This adds maintenance burden, and had I known
that Empathy / Telepathy was going to be abandoned soon after merging
the bridge, I'd probably have pushed harder for a different
approach. Note that this means a client like Pidgin or Gaim cannot use
the Telepathy provider because then they would grow a needless
dependency on another chat system.

Fast forward to the present, I want to port GNOME Online Accounts to
Meson. To do that, first the telepathy-account-widgets submodule,
which provides the UI for Telepathy accounts, needs to be
ported. That's a problem because I don't want go around hacking the
build systems of unmaintained modules. Even if somebody else was to do
it, there will inevitably be some fallout, and as someone who gets to
keep the Empathy / Telepathy stack on life support, I am really not
looking forward to that prospect.

So the upshot of all this is that I'll be removing the Telepathy
provider from GOA when the 3.29.x / 3.30 cycle starts after spring
2018, and it won't be part of the GNOME 3.30 release in autumn 2018.

Have a nice day & happy hacking,
Rishi