kde-telepathy-text-ui hijacks Empathy in Unity

[Sven Romeike]

When kubuntu-desktop is installed the KDE Telepathy Programm hijacks the Unity integrated Empathy whithout asking the user so if unity is started Empathy doesnt react anymore like it should.

When you open Empathy messages through the indicator of through the launcher icon it either doesnt open any window or it opens the kde-telepathy-text-ui version which doesnt seem to be localized when opened.

When i uninstall kde-telepathy-text-ui and relog or restart empathy the issue is resolved but it is very annoying if you want to test multiple Desktops and don't know why your old desktop starts behaving crazy.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: kde-telepathy-text-ui 0.3.0-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-18.28-generic-pae 3.2.9
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-18-generic-pae i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 1.94.1-0ubuntu1
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Mar 9 21:07:35 2012
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Alpha i386 (20120225)
SourcePackage: ktp-text-ui
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Bilal Shahid (s9iper1)]

elaborate it and see if you can give the steps to reproduce it.?

[Sven Romeike (lun4tic)]

* install kubuntu desktop
* log on to unity
* start empathy
* receive a message
* open message through indicator menu

the kde-telepathy-text-ui will open instead of the unity one.

[Bilal Shahid (s9iper1)]

i think that should be filed in kubuntu not in empathy-ubuntu

[Bilal Shahid (s9iper1)]

hang on a second sorry for my last comment
 please somebody send this bug to upstream.

[Bilal Shahid (s9iper1)]

before upstreaming just answer my these question

* Is this reproducible?
* If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?

This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

[Sven Romeike (lun4tic)]

It is definately reproducable.

Specific steps are:

1) log into a default ubuntu installation
2) install "kubuntu-desktop" with all depencies
3) after you restart empathy it uses the QT UI from the package "kde-telepathy-text-ui" that was installed as depency
4) when you uninstall "kde-telepathy-text-ui" everything turns back to normal.

I installed "kde-telepathy-text-ui" multiple times as depency of "kubuntu-desktop" and manually and its always the same. when you call your messages through the indicators it uses the "kde-telepathy-text-ui" window and there seems to be no way to set the default.

possible solution: use the /etc/alternatives to set a default telepathy UI and add that to the Settings for the default applications.

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

I am not familiar with kde-telepathy-text-ui, but it must provide a telepathy channel handlers. When activating the message in the indicator, it tells telepathy that you wish to handle that channel. Telepathy chooses the handler to use, which in a typical ubuntu-desktop installation is empathy. I am not sure how it chooses if there are more than one installed.

[Sven Romeike (lun4tic)]

as i recommended if its possible put it in the /etc/alternatives I did not see anything there that matches telepathy and the kubuntu-desktop install also did not tell me whether i want to use the empathy or KDE Version

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Roland (Rolandixor) Taylor (rolandixor)]

I have confirmed this. Marked as confirmed.

[David Edmundson (david.edmundson)]

This is not a bug in KDE Telepathy rather the opposite.

All telepathy clients are dbus activated, so dbus just chooses whatever app can handle it (in this case, showing a text chat)

In telepathy whoever is launching a channel can provide a "preferredHandler" and give the name of the handler.
Unity clearly isn't giving one, (empathy) so dbus loads something at random. Setting a prerfferedHandler on ensure_channel will solve this.

(signed, KDE Telepathy developer)

[Roland (Rolandixor) Taylor (rolandixor)]

It would be more useful if you told us how to do this (I am guessing by editing the .service files in /etc/dbus as usual?).

[Shrikant (shrikant)]

Hi,

I had the same issue, and I figured out how to do change the handler (Ubuntu 12.10).

Edit /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Client.KTp.TextUi.service to comment out (or remove) the link to ktp-text-ui and use Empathy instead.

In the end, the service file will look like this:

    [D-BUS Service]
    Name=org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Client.KTp.TextUi
    # Exec=/usr/lib/kde4/libexec/ktp-text-ui
    Exec=/usr/lib/empathy/empathy-chat

After this, I figured I had to restart dbus, but doing a "sudo service dbus restart" is evidently a bad idea, since it locks up everything.

So I suppose you have to log out and log back in (or reboot, which is what I ended up having to do).

[Walter Garcia-Fontes (walter-garcia)]

 Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test it on a currently supported Ubuntu version. When you test it and it is still an issue, kindly upload the updated logs by running apport-collect <bug #> and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for empathy (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ktp-text-ui (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]