[Gossip-dev] Re: [Telepathy] Telepathy Status

[Martyn Russell]

Jimen Ching wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, Eitan Isaacson wrote:
>> For selfish reasons I would _love_ to see Gossip-Telepathy included in
>> Gnome 2.18. But besides the obvious immature code, we also don't yet
>> have a good multi-protocol story. This is the reason distributions
>> choose Gaim over us. So besides gabble, what we really need is three or
>> four other feature-rich connection managers for the major protocols.
> 
> I'm surprised that so many of the Gossip developers feel that 6 months
> of development isn't sufficient to stabilize telepathy-gossip for
> inclusion into GNOME.  Granted, I don't think it's possible to support
> 12 IM protocols.  But 6 months should be enough to support the major ones.

Consider that we know the code base, and what it would take to implement
the protocols properly in the UI. That's the foundation for the reasoning.

As some indication of how long these things take, we (Micke and I) spent
the best part of 3 months refactoring the code to add libgossip and make
the middle-ware of Gossip generic enough for this sort of Technology
(Telepathy). I and others have also spent > 6 months writing the UI to
work with n+1 accounts in the chat rooms window, the accounts window,
the personal information window, the add contact window, etc. This is
just adding n+1 accounts, imagine how long it will take to add n+1
account types given that they also don't all operate in one way
(consider IRC and Jabber).

> Is the concern that there's not enough developers?  Or not enough time
> spent on the project by develoeprs? 

Yes and yes.

> Perhaps if Gossip development has a
> schedule.  I know free software development don't like schedules.  But
> you know what they say about time management.  If you don't prioritize,
> time will slip away without knowing where it went.  If this applies to
> every day life, it should apply to software development.

What is the point in having a schedule if the work input is not
consistent enough to guarantee such a schedule could be kept to?

> I would like to know what it would take to be included into GNOME (in
> terms of features), and why it can't be achieved in 6 months.  This is
> an IM client, after all.  Not a telephone switching software.

Remember that the Telepathy landscape is still shaping. By that I mean
that this is not glib 2.10 which has been stable and used for a long
time. Instead it is having new features added all the time (some which
are really basic and a necessity for Gossip) and there will be bugs. If
you consider that it might take 3 months for Telepathy to get to a place
where they support all the key features of Gossip now and that it would
be stable by then too, that leaves the Gossip team (of 2/3 people plus 2
volunteers) 3 months to implement all the backend, all multi protocol UI
updates and any fixes in between. This leaves no time for any testing
what so ever.

This 6 month pressure will only mean there will be more bugs than if we
took our time and got it right.

> One concern I do have is this discussion about accounts.  I hope this
> won't drag on for months...

Drag on?

So yes, 6 months isn't long enough and even at the rate of knots we are
going now with all the patches Xavier and Eitan are writing, I still
don't think that Telepathy will be feature rich and stable enough to
replace what we currently have in Gossip in 6 months time - perhaps I
will be wrong, but we certainly won't have time to implement the UI in
Gossip in that time frame.

-- 
Regards,
Martyn