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

[Robert McQueen]

Jimen Ching wrote:
> In another email, you said Telepathy and the internal XMPP backend can
> coexist.  This is true.  But this is redundant in the long term.  And by
> long term, I mean 6+ months.  You also said that you would like to keep
> the internal XMPP backend and only use Telepathy for other protocols.  I
> don't know if you brought up this idea when you spoke with Rob McQueen.
> Considering Rob is one of the main developers of Gabble, I doubt he
> would advocate this approach.

Not quite; I'd say the choice was between using Telepathy for XMPP and
other protocols (if you wish to embrace the Telepathy way, desktop
integration, connection sharing, etc) or using Gossip as an XMPP only
client with its own XMPP backend. I don't advocate the latter approach
in the long term, but I understand their reasons for not wanting to sign
a death warrant on the working & tested code that they have.

Based on talking to Richard and Mikael on IRC, they're worried
(legitimately, up to a point) about the loss of flexibility from
introducing a dependency on someone else's backend - it becomes harder
to add new features/extentions. And for some of the developers, they're
just not interested in supporting anything but XMPP; or the additional
support burden that could come from being the user-visible part of a
variety of other software running behind the scenes.

Given these valid concerns, I don't see any problem with development
continuing in parallel as it currently is. You won't hear any complaints
from me, I'm very happy that any of you have picked up the Telepathy
stuff at all. :)

> In any case, it's the Gossip developer's decision...
> 
> --jc

Regards,
Rob