empathy should Recommend: telepathy-idle to support IRC

[Daniel Moerner]

Binary package hint: empathy

There has been some discussion on including empathy in future releases of Ubuntu instead of Pidgin. To replicate Pidgin's functionality, Empathy should include IRC support to avoid the inclusion of extra cruft (e.g. XChat) for which there is no room on the LiveCD. Therefore, I think that empathy should recommend telepathy-idle to support IRC.

Thanks to Chris Rogers for the suggestion of the appropriate backend (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5563746&postcount=5)

Package: empathy
Priority: optional
Section: universe/gnome
Installed-Size: 272
Maintainer: Ubuntu MOTU Developers <email address hidden>
Original-Maintainer: Debian Telepathy maintainers <email address hidden>
Architecture: i386
Version: 2.23.6-0ubuntu2
Depends: libatk1.0-0 (>= 1.20.0), libbonobo2-0 (>= 2.15.0), libc6 (>= 2.4), libcairo2 (>= 1.2.4), libdbus-1-3 (>= 1.0.2), libdbus-glib-1-2 (>= 0.71), libebook1.2-9 (>= 2.23.6), libedataserver1.2-11 (>= 2.23.6), libempathy-gtk15 (>= 0.23.2), libempathy14 (>= 0.23.4), libenchant1c2a, libfontconfig1 (>= 2.4.0), libfreetype6 (>= 2.3.5), libgconf2-4 (>= 2.13.5), libglade2-0 (>= 1:2.6.1), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.16.0), libgnome2-0 (>= 2.17.3), libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.13.6), libmissioncontrol-client0 (>= 4.37), liborbit2 (>= 1:2.14.10), libpango1.0-0 (>= 1.21.3), libpixman-1-0, libpng12-0 (>= 1.2.13-4), libpopt0 (>= 1.14), libsoup2.4-1 (>= 2.23.6), libtelepathy-glib0 (>= 0.7.7), libtelepathy2 (>= 0.0.57), libx11-6, libxcb-render-util0, libxcb-render0, libxcb1, libxml2 (>= 2.6.27), libxrender1, zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4), dbus-x11
Recommends: telepathy-gabble, telepathy-salut, telepathy-butterfly, telepathy-haze, telepathy-stream-engine, gvfs-backends
Conflicts: telepathy-stream-engine (<< 0.5.2)
Filename: pool/universe/e/empathy/empathy_2.23.6-0ubuntu2_i386.deb
Size: 131686
MD5sum: 886bbd7687e09935b63216756ed5ceb4
SHA1: 20236f5ff69b894e3dae2641f7af98dc254177db
SHA256: 97feb420c315b0e8893a581e0db30fd937b6737be7e2fb13878cd3def3e48f3a
Description: High-level library and user-interface for Telepathy
 Empathy consists of a rich set of reusable instant messaging widgets, and a
 GNOME client using those widgets. It uses Telepathy and Nokia's Mission
 Control, and reuses Gossip's UI. The main goal is to permit desktop
 integration by providing libempathy and libempathy-gtk libraries.
 libempathy-gtk is a set of powerful widgets that can be embeded into any
 GNOME application.
 .
 This packet contains the empathy IM application and account manager.
Bugs: mailto:<email address hidden>
Origin: Ubuntu

[David Futcher (bobbo)]

I know a lot of people have been complaining about lack of IRC support by default, so here is a debdiff to fix this. Subscribing u-u-s for sponsoring.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package empathy - 2.23.6-0ubuntu3

---------------
empathy (2.23.6-0ubuntu3) intrepid; urgency=low

  * Add telepathy-idle as recommends for the empathy package (LP: #256783)

 -- David Futcher <email address hidden> Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:34:16 +0100

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

not sure the change makes really sense, most users don't use IRC and that should probably be a suggests rather

[Xavier Claessens (zdra)]

I agree with Sebastien, Empathy is not good for IRC and we should not encourage using it. I think xchat-gnome is still the best IRC client by far. I think it's best to have a suggest than a recommend.

[Laurent Bigonville (bigon)]

ok will do another upload

[Scott Ritchie (scottritchie)]

I disagree, the recommendation should be reenabled: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/empathy/+bug/388906

I installed Karmic Alpha 3 and attempted to use Empathy to import my pidgin accounts. My pidgin IRC was simply broken with no feedback as to why. I imagine many users will face this problem when upgrading.

[Brian Curtis (bcurtiswx)]

xavier, xchat-gnome hasn't been supported in over 3-4 years. with empathy changes happening by the minute, i believe its really important that empathy supports IRC very well. people don't want to install two programs, when one can do just as good.

[Scott Ritchie (scottritchie)]

I'm going to reopen this one because it seems like a regression for users of pidgin IRC

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

It's already pulled in by ubuntu-desktop, isn't that enough?

[xteejx (xteejx)]

I believe empathy should recommend telepathy-idle. It makes more sense to have IRC enabled by default instead of messing around trying to work out exactly how to do this. For the new linux users it is hardly intuitive that empathy uses telepathy plugins, and since pidgin supported IRC by default, and since it was the previous default messaging client, it should definitely be a recommend, if not for the users upgrading from Jaunty and get confused.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

There's nothing to be sponsored here, I unsubscribe the sponsors now. It's in main and gets pulled in through ubuntu-desktop.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your work bug empathy is mainly an im client not an IRC one and ubuntu-desktop recommends telepathy-idle which should be enough

You might want to take that discussion on the Debian BTS since we mostly follow their choice there

[Alex Lourie (alourie)]

I think that should be followed upon.

[Bilal Shahid (s9iper1)]

i guess empathy support xchat irc...marking as invalid and Mohamed Amine IL Idrissi (ilidrissi.amine)
 is also not working on this.so unassigning it. if any problem related empathy irc than please feel free to report the bug.

[Jānis Kangarooo (kangarooo)]

Why its invalid? Its fixed in 12.04 and needs backport to 10.04 LTS