Talk:Features/Empathy

Feature Wrangler Review

• Please update owner information
  • John, why do you think feature ownership should be limited to individuals ?
  • I'm fine with having the desktop team being the owners, but we need some kind of e-mail addy, so we can contact feature owners on FESCo meeting invites, summaries, etc. - bpepple
    • If FESCo doesn't know how to contact the desktop team, we have a problem...

Pro Arguments for Empathy

• Voice chat with GoogleTalk (though this will probably need us to look at our firewall rules for this to work out of the box) - bpepple
• Better GNOME integration the Pidgin - bpepple
• Account migration support from Pidgin has been added to Empathy. Not really a big issue since this feature is for new installs, but still worth pointing out. - bpepple
• Support for Tubes (for AbiWord collaration, etc) - bepple
• Geo Location. Geo location support was just merged in tp-gabble today, and should hopefully make it into Empathy in time for the F11 release. More info: http://blog.pierlux.com/2009/01/22/empathy-where-are-you/en/ - bpepple

From the description on Features/Empathy page it is not obvious why the change to Empathy as default should be done. I assume that "Stay in sync with upstream" refers to GNOME. Yes, of course we should have the latest and greatest version of Empathy. But making it default just because it is GNOME would be an bad idea if the alternatives are better. I am sure you have good reason. From the Pro list here I understand that voice chat is the killer feature. And apparently also that you you consider it a more long term solution than Pidgin. Please consider stating the "Benefit to Fedora" more clearly! Kiilerix 23:04, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

• I agree with Kiilerix - the benefits of Empathy are unclear and insufficient. --Improv 18:49, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Con Arguments for Empathy

• File transfer support currently is only implemented for Link-local XMPP (telepathy-salut) - bpepple
  • Works fine for non local XMPP (telepathy-gabble) too in Fedora 11 - Mathieu Bridon 10:53, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
• Missing plugin system, so many of the add-on features available to Pidgin (like encryption, etc) are not available to Empathy - bpepple
• Account dialog still has some issues (like http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548717), which I'm not sure will be completed before F11 - bpepple
• IRC support (telepathy-idle) sorta sucks in Empathy. for example, chat windows don't show what irc-room it's for. - bpepple
  • I just tried again, and found that it does show the channel information nowadays. This has been fixed. - mclasen
• Telepathy-haze multi-protocol support has been a bit spotty. We seem to get a fair amount of bug reports about the various protocols (yahoo, etc) not working for folks. - bpepple

Misc wish list items

• Support for logging in with GSSAPI/Kerberos with XMPP. Pidgin currently supports this, but I'm not 100% sure this should be considered a block for making Empathy the default IM. Bug #472655 - bpepple