Empathy, antipathy and Instant Messaging
It is not news that Empathy will replace Pidgin in Karmic. I do not want to comment on the decision, that has all been laid out epically. I want to join in the good spirit and try to get the best out of it. There is a PPA you can use to get the latest release (I still don’t get the meshwork of Telepathy, Empathy, Gossip. Who is the specification reference implementation of whose UI taken frontend, backend protocol library multiprotocol instant messenger for gnome??)
My first impression: Slick, but how do I group the different accounts of one person?
Slightly after that: Oh, I can’t. Well, this is clearly a feature that should not be so hard to accomplish and is such an obvious disadvantage against pidgin that the devs will implement this soonish because it would be such easy karma from the users. Right? Epic NO!
There is a bug report since 2 years. Over a dozen other bugs have been marked as duplicates, so there seems to be user attention for this. Throughout the bug report several things get clear:
- Implementing “Persons” in the right way across the whole bubble persons interact in is not trivial.
- This Bug is far from beeing fixed, or even triaged
- There is no clear drive (in terms of roadmap, responsibility)
- There is no effort or aim to provide a workaround to “provide” this feature. Pidgin doesn’t have what the people project talks about either. But in pidgin I can group one person into one contact. I know that empathy is not a rewrite of pidgin. I know that empathy does not try to substitute pidgin 1:1
So I kind of wonder? What can we do?
Accept that it will probably not be available for a long time? Of course, if it bugs me, I can fix it myself. As I am neither experienced nor know anything about this project, that is not the option?
But I want to come back to the spirit. What is the best way to hug Empathy so hard it will fix this bug?
Tags: (k)ubuntu
21. Juni 2009 um 00:51
[...] epic fail!» Blogarchiv » Empathy, antipathy and Instant Messaging [...]
21. Juni 2009 um 17:14
“So I kind of wonder? What can we do?”
It’s quite simple since Ubuntu, through aptitude, enables one to install AND uninstall programs. What I would do is uninstall Empathy, then install Pidgin. :-O
That way you would NOT have Empathy, but you WOULD have Pidgin! Problemo Solved-o.
21. Juni 2009 um 19:48
Except that doesn’t solve the problem at all. This post is not about choosing Pidgin. It is about having chosen Empathy and trying to solve an issue that is out there for a very long time.