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
  • pidgin-2.6.0 supports this.
  • This requires non-free codecs from gstreamer plugins to fully interoperate with GoogleTalk, and you need to manually edit your firewall rules. - warren
• Better GNOME integration than 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 F12 release. More info: http://blog.pierlux.com/2009/01/22/empathy-where-are-you/en/ - bpepple

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
  • I filed the yahoo not working bug. Upstream maintainers are very responsive to this sort of thing, and were very quick to fix telepathy-haze. Yahoo now works again (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=591381) - caillon
  • Not sure whether it is still true, but multi-user chat finally works with tp-haze (it used to be limited just to one-on-one conversation)?
• Empathy is useless behind a proxy. Most corporate and university users can't use empathy at all. Pidgin works fine behind proxy.
• MUC/IRC chat support is a joke. Upstream author have been promising for the last two years xchat-gnome-like interface for Telepathy (or straight rewriting of xchat-gnome to use Telepathy instead of xchat-engine which is there now), but it never came to anything. Without it Empathy is quite hard to be a replacement for pidgin in the multi-person chat area.
• support for VoIP is very immature ... e.g., ekiga.net cannot be used for account (although it has a special icon in the account creation dialog), I was not able to make it reliably work with talk.fp.o account. UI is also quite miserable (again), no SIP contacts in a buddy list, no history in the call dialog, which is somehow hidden under "Send IM message" dialog.
• supports only GTalk XMPP VoIP, not standardized Jingle XEPs (not that pidgin support would be that great, but at least it is based on standards).

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