nothing from Empathy shows up in "irc" search in Software Center

[Greg Price]

A user who wants to use IRC should be able to find Empathy as a way to do so. Unfortunately, searching in Ubuntu Software Center for "irc" doesn't return anything that leads to Empathy.

The first result is some client called "tekka" (which crashes on startup); Konversation and Pidgin also make the list, among many others. There is no Empathy, or telepathy-idle (which the Empathy help tells me I need to use IRC in Empathy), or account-plugin-irc (which is from the empathy source package, and which people tell me to install to use IRC in Empathy.)

I'm not sure how Software Center search works, but I expect a suitable tweak to the package metadata would fix the issue.

I'm on 12.10 with empathy version 3.5.91-0ubuntu2.

[Bilal Shahid (s9iper1)]

thanks for the bug report
please confirm this you are searching empathy or irc because irc xchat is also a software for the chat and empathy as well you need to add the account of irc in accounts of empathy

[Greg Price (gregprice)]

I am searching Ubuntu Software Center for the search query "irc" (three letters, no quotes.) A user who is looking for a way to use IRC is likely to try that search, and Empathy plus account-plugin-irc is a good answer for them, perhaps the best answer for them. Therefore that answer should show up in that search -- either in the form of the empathy package itself or the account-plugin-irc package. Neither package does.

I filed this bug against empathy because empathy's and account-plugin-irc's package metadata control how they are found in Software Center. (Both come from the empathy source package.)

[blaamann (baggetun)]

Searching for IRC does not list a bunch of relevant IRC application. E.g Irssi and Weechat is not listed in the search result.

Even worse, IRC support is not installed by default in Empathy in 12.10 (this should probably be a seperate bug report)

Is IRC support available in Empathy in 12.10?
e@B570e:~$ apt-cache search account-plugin-irc
account-plugin-irc - Messaging account plugin for IRC

Is it installed?
e@B570e:~$ dpkg -l | grep account-plugin-irc
e@B570e:~$

This is bad.

[Bilal Shahid (s9iper1)]

that might be a software center bug from ubuntu