Comment 73 for bug 304889

First of all, GNOME never switched from Pidgin to Empathy because Pidgin has never been part of GNOME, and has never intended to. It's just a GTK+ app that has never collaborated with anyone... GNOME, freedesktop.org, etc. So, before Empathy, GNOME didn't really have an alternative.

Now, I think distributions should have made proxy support a _blocker_ feature for Empathy inclusion (regardless of GNOME's decision), but that didn't happen, and now people are complaining (understandably) because the default IM client just doesn't work (for them).

I don't agree with Guillaume, I think people have a reason to complain, but it would be nice to do it in a more constructive manner, and perhaps follow the upstream bugs, and perhaps provide some testing. However, the upstream bugs are very scattered and unclear.

For example, telepathy-haze *already* has proxy support since libpurple already has proxy support, however, it works mostly by accident, behind the back of telepathy-haze using GConf. All Telepathy guys need to do is add some configuration to pass to libpurple, and use telepathy-haze instead of native CM's.

Unfortunately, for political reasons I doubt Telepathy guys would do that, instead they will wait until their native CM's do support proxy properly.

If Ubuntu guys are interested, I'm sure I can provide patches for that.