[Gossip-dev] Gossip for GNOME 2.16?

[Martyn Russell]

On Thu, 2006-03-09 at 22:03 +0100, David Nielsen wrote:
> Hi list
> 
> Pretaining to Michal' earlier blog post on the subject, I was wondering
> if there was any interest in proposing Gossip for the coming 2.16 cycle.

I have always thought it would be cool to have Gossip part of Gnome, but
the reality is, that it brings a whole bunch of issues with it that we
would rather avoid at the moment. To mention a few:

* Code/UI/translation freezes.
* Releasing on a schedule.
* That other issue I can't think of right now :)

> I, for one, would love to see GNOME take a more active step in
> supporting open standards like Jabber- if Google can do it, one of the
> single most influencial IT companies, surely we could eat our own
> poison.

Yes, I think it would be good for Gnome to say we have an IM client that
supports XMPP and more open standards.

> Gossip would make an outstanding contribution to the platform, we don't
> currently provide any means of instant messaging and looking around at
> my peers this is one of the single most used features on alternative
> platforms - having this would therefore potentially increase our
> marketshare and attract more users.

Perhaps.

But distros can ship with support for Gossip if they choose to
regardless of being part of Gnome or not and some probably do.

I personally am in two minds about this. I would love all that Gossip
would benefit from being part of Gnome, but at the same time, Gossip is
actively being developed and changes quite a bit from release to
release. I can imagine many more bug reports from people due to the
constant changes being applied (similar to the recent account "resource"
issues we faced) when really, we are just redesigning some aspects to
get them right from our experiences. 

Bare in mind I have no doubt that Gossip is mature enough to be
included.

Perhaps Micke and Richard could comment further on this to share their
opinions?

-- 
Regards,
Martyn