Empathy default in F12?

[Demz]

is this Instant messenger ready to be made default? i dont think it is, it still lacks features pidgin has. i just took a look at Ubuntu9.10 an Empathy wasnt much better than previous releases.

[Robert2]

It seems F12 will default on a new install to Empathy, but on an upgrade it will keep Pidgin as the default. So if you do not like Empathy for one reason or another you can still install pidgin.

[Demz]

i just dont think its ready to be default, i mean what real features does it have, i would think 99% of users will stick with pidgin anyway

[rexbinary]

I would have to agree. It doesn't seem like it really offers anything over Pidgin right now. Ubuntu is doing it so I guess Fedora feels like it needs to as well?

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Empathy

[Demz]

i dont think Empathy offers SSL connections either?

[Ard Righ]

I would have to agree. It doesn't seem like it really offers anything over Pidgin right now. Ubuntu is doing it so I guess Fedora feels like it needs to as well?

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Empathy

Voice and Video call using SIP and XMPP (including support for Google Talk voice calls) - a good start is voice and video support which has been requested for YEARS in GAIM/Pidgin, and mostly ignored.

Even the branch for GAIM/Pidgin with Voice and Video died away.

So yes, there are decent features in Empathy that Pidgin doesn't have, that a lot of people have waited for. The other problems could use some polish, but let's not kid ourselves, Pidgin has it's own major problems to address.

[Demz]

Voice and Video call using SIP and XMPP (including support for Google Talk voice calls) - a good start is voice and video support which has been requested for YEARS in GAIM/Pidgin, and mostly ignored.

Even the branch for GAIM/Pidgin with Voice and Video died away.

So yes, there are decent features in Empathy that Pidgin doesn't have, that a lot of people have waited for. The other problems could use some polish, but let's not kid ourselves, Pidgin has it's own major problems to address.

you are aware that Pidgin 2.6.0 will have Voice/Video Support? ..what Major problems are these?. correct me if im wrong, people that neeed to use SSL connections in Empathy cant cause its not supported? those people will have to use Pidgin instead

[Ard Righ]

you are aware that Pidgin 2.6.0 will have Voice/Video Support?

I'll believe pidgin has voice and video support when it's actually installed and working on my PC as a standard part of the Fedora package. Until then, I won't hold my breath.

As much as I appreciate the work the Pidgin devs do, they have historically gone out of their way to kill voice&video support every time someone has started talking about adding it.

[Demz]

however i do believe Empathy will use Pidgins Voice & Video within libpurple . Empathy gets some of its features from pidgin/libpurple ..if you remember Gaim/Pidgin used to have a plugin called ( gaim vv ) i think the pidgin devs have just fixed that up. Empathy doesnt have its own Plugins like Pidgin has so Empathy needs to rely on pidgins plugins to be there/working . why do you think its taken this long to get a fully working Voice/Video working in Empathy? .. remember not everyone can use Voice so its useless to those that cant use it, people with speech impairment. custom Emoticons, that isnt such a Great feature, Empathy devs need to work on real features not kindergarten features

[Ard Righ]

however i do believe Empathy will use Pidgins Voice & Video within libpurple . Empathy gets some of its features from pidgin/libpurple

Empathy uses the Telepathy framework, which has a decent website http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/

It might be helpful if you read up on Telepathy and Empathy properly.

The part of libpurple that Empathy used, was for MSN support, but it also has it's own MSN connection handler.

I don't see why Empathy would want to use VV support from Pidgin, when that's what the Telepathy framework is designed for...

[Demz]

http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/9754 set for 2.6.0 uses SIP ..http://developer.pidgin.im/query?group=status&milestone=2.6.0 most of those bug fix's had to be fixed for Empathy to even use its newer features like Voice an Video . Empathy is a crap IM an is not ready to be made default . as i said before Empathy lacks in SSL connections for people that need that ability, where as Pidgin does that. why introduce a new IM when it cannot do these?

only use i have for Empathy is offline messages , apart from that nothing else .

we should get some stats on how may will use Empathy or use Empathy , i for one will not be

[wjt]

Hi,

It seems like there's some (understandable) confusion about the components involved in Telepathy. I'm a Telepathy (and occasional libpurple and Pidgin) developer, so thought I'd try to clear this up a bit.

Empathy itself doesn't make connections to IM servers (Google Talk, MSN, etc.); this is the job of Telepathy's connection managers, which are a collection of daemons implementing support for various protocols. So, the features that Empathy supports on a protocol depend entirely on how advanced the connection manager is:


For XMPP (as used by Jabber and Google Talk), the CM is called telepathy-gabble. Gabble's the most advanced CM we have; among its many other features, it's supported audio and video calls for years.
For SIP, the telepathy-sofiasip CM is used; it supports audio and video calls.
For MSN, the best CM is telepathy-butterfly, which will support audio and video calls from the next release.
For IRC and Link-Local XMPP (branded as Bonjour by Apple), the CMs are telepathy-idle and telepathy-salut; neither supports audio and video calls. (There are also a few other one-protocol CMs being worked on, but they're not stable yet.)


So far, nothing I've mentioned uses libpurple. However: for AIM, Yahoo!, ICQ, etc., the CM is telepathy-haze, which is built on libpurple. This lets us reuse the protocol code in libpurple, but so far only supports simple things like text IM. (You can also use haze for MSN, but with the next release of butterfly you'll be even better off using that, since you get calls!)

you are aware that Pidgin 2.6.0 will have Voice/Video Support?

That's true, but only on XMPP for now.

Empathy doesnt have its own Plugins like Pidgin has so Empathy needs to rely on pidgins plugins to be there/working

As I mentioned, Empathy doesn't make the connections to IM servers itself. It uses Haze for some protocols. It doesn't use any Pidgin or libpurple plugins itself.

correct me if im wrong, people that neeed to use SSL connections in Empathy cant cause its not supported?

All of the Telepathy connection managers support SSL where appropriate. Consider yourself corrected. ;-)

however i do believe Empathy will use Pidgins Voice & Video within libpurple

Hmm.

Empathy uses a library named Farsight (built on GStreamer) to actually send audio and video over the internet, and display it on the screen (oversimplification, but it'll do). Pidgin 2.6.0 will also use Farsight to do this.

(It's feasible that, at some point in the future, libpurple will support audio/video calls on a protocol like AIM, for which we don't have a separate Telepathy connection manager which supports a/v. At that point, it would make sense for us to expose libpurple's a/v code to Telepathy via haze. But this is very hypothetical; there are no plans to do this at the moment, because there's no point.)

http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/9754 set for 2.6.0 uses SIP

That ticket's not "set for 2.6.0". No-one has worked on SIP calling support in libpurple.

http://developer.pidgin.im/query?group=status&milestone=2.6.0 most of those bug fix's had to be fixed for Empathy to even use its newer features like Voice an Video

No. Nothing on that list has anything *whatsoever* to do with Empathy's audio and video calling support.

custom Emoticons, that isnt such a Great feature, Empathy devs need to work on real features not kindergarten features

I don't really understand this. Are you saying that custom emoticons are a “kindergarten feature”? If so, great! Empathy doesn't support those. ;-) What “real features” are you referring to here?

Empathy supports file transfers and group chats; I think that between this, calls and (of course) IMs, that covers most of what people actually use. On top of that, using Telepathy enables really interesting possibilities for desktop integration, such as sharing your desktop with your IM contacts (which is supported in Empathy master, if you have recent enough Vino and Vinagre: just right-click a contact, and pick "share my desktop"!). My colleague Guillaume Desmottes gave an excellent talk recently about these possibilities; if you're interested, take a look at his slides: http://people.collabora.co.uk/~cassidy/talks/2009-07-07-lets-make-gnome-a-collaborative-desktop.pdf

I hope this helps clear up the confusion!

[Demz]

yeah it does clear things up

[Demz]

is it true if one sends an offline message or any message to someone using Empathy an that person is offline they will not get that message? http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7707856&postcount=303

[Finalzone]

Does empathy properly support IRC? The version (2.26.2) I used on Fedora 11 is completely broken.

[Demz]

only way to findout is to test it with the Alpha LiveCD of F12

[wjt]

is it true if one sends an offline message or any message to someone using Empathy an that person is offline they will not get that message? http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7707856&postcount=303

Again, this isn't up to Empathy, it's up to the protocol component in use. I'm not a Butterfly developer or user, but Olivier (the poster of that comment) is, so I'd take his word for it that Butterfly doesn't support receiving offline messages on MSN.

Being the Haze maintainer, I use it for MSN, and offline messages work for me...

[wjt]

Does empathy properly support IRC? The version (2.26.2) I used on Fedora 11 is completely broken.

I IRC with Empathy (2.27.x) and telepathy-idle (the IRC component) daily. It works pretty well, although the Empathy UI doesn't scale enormously well to >30 channels...

[Demz]

Again, this isn't up to Empathy, it's up to the protocol component in use. I'm not a Butterfly developer or user, but Olivier (the poster of that comment) is, so I'd take his word for it that Butterfly doesn't support receiving offline messages on MSN.

Being the Haze maintainer, I use it for MSN, and offline messages work for me...

i have tested Empathy2.27.x an works fine for me to but with it not being able to recieve offline messages seems useless to make it default at the moment

[pankajp]

No proxy support in empathy is a show stopper for me. pidgin works

[Demz]

No proxy support in empathy is a show stopper for me. pidgin works

no proxy support, there u go it aint ready to be default

[Demz]

IS IT ME
or is there no way to BLOCK people on empathy?! what kinda nonsense is this!!!http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7694769&postcount=298

Not you, it's not yet implemented.http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7698933&postcount=299

[Demz]

Things done for GNOME 2.28

# Improved Contact List window

* New presence chooser widget: enter text directly or select from previously set statuses.
* You can now start audio only or audio/video calls directly
* Drag and drop of contacts in the Contact List is now a move action (as opposed to copy)
* Now has a View menu with quick access to sorting, offline contacts and contact list's size preferences
* New Debug option under Help where you can access Empathy and Telepathy's debugging messages.

# Improved Conversation dialog

*

More message styles with the support for Adium message styles. See http://live.gnome.org/Empathy/Themes for tested themes.
* You can now hide the user list in chat rooms. It can be set as a default in the preferences too.
* The users in the user list now have a tooltip.
* If your name is mentioned in a chat room, the tab's text will become red.
* Contact menu is no more under the Conversation menu

# Improved Join chat room dialog

* Now displays if rooms are password protected or invite only
* Allows sorting
* Now has error reporting

# Improved Audio/Video Chat dialog

* Can now be made fullscreen
* When no video available, the contact's avatar is displayed
* There is now a redial option

# Share your desktop with your contacts using Vinagre in 2 clicks from the Contact List
#

Geolocation (see updated FAQ )

* Publish your location to your XMPP contacts using Geoclue. Supports a reduced accuracy mode for privacy.
* View your contact's location in their tool-tip, the Information dialog or on the Map View. When libchamplain 0.4 is available, the location is displayed on an interactive map.

# Notification when contacts become online and offline http://live.gnome.org/Empathy/Roadmap

[pauljr8]

FWIW I have been in the Redhat camp since 2001 and RH 5. Prior to that I became quite reliant on netmeeting. With a bit of tweaking between the 2 endpoints it was for many years a solid well performing reliable program. Gnomemeeting was a step down but still usable. I was thrilled to see a substitute for the pidgin/ekiga era. Now here I am with Empathy asking myself if it will endure through at least FC12 and will it be working by then? I'd be happy to test/troubleshoot for anyone working on it as I would really like to have the voice/video/chat/collaboration program as dependable as the one those guys in window world stumbled on with netmeeting many years ago. I am well versed in the setup, configuration and tweaking of Redhat/Fedora programs.

[Demz]

i just played with it in F12 Alpha LiveCD, crashed on me, but only thing i dislike about it, it does not download a List of IRC channels

[pauljr8]

LMAO :confused:
I'm inclined to dislike the crashing part the most.

[Demz]

LMAO :confused:
I'm inclined to dislike the crashing part the most.

mabe you have to have some telepathy plugin for it to download IRC channels i dunno? i had to manually type in the room i wanted to join.

about the crash, as soon as i used the Location thingy it crashed an i had Empathy updated to

[AdamW]

pauljr8: Ekiga would make far more sense as a NetMeeting replacement. Especially since it's the same thing as gnomemeeting (it got renamed years ago).

[Demz]

that Location thingy in Empathy whenever i use that it always tends to crash Empathy an it was up to date to