[Gossip-dev] Using xchat-gnome's UI for gossip chatrooms

[Mikael Hallendal]

21 jan 2007 kl. 13.17 skrev Xavier Claessens:

Hi,

>> It's the same as with all multi-functionality tools. You can use your
>> swiss army knife to screw, cut, looking glass. However a screwdriver,
>> a larger knife or a larger looking glass will always do the job  
>> better.
>>
>> Gossip is currently leaning towards becoming a swiss army knife and
>> by doing so you just have to accept that you will not cater those
>> that are looking for the real tools.
>
> I agree, gossip will certainly not implement all IRC features, but who
> need them ? I think most users just want IM to be well integrated  
> in the
> desktop don't need that much functionality. That's why we need a
> telepathy IRC client ! Now this telepathy IRC client can be a separate
> application to provide a more irc specific UI, but that needs more  
> work
> to build another client using telepathy. Gossip already implement most
> telepathy features and has a good (even if not perfect) chatroom
> abstraction in libgossip that will save lots of work to reuse that
> pieces (I hope so). In the end all chatroom protocol is nothing more
> than a list of joined rooms with for each a list of members, a  
> topic and
> a text-view.

There are loads of people who use the more advanced features of IRC,  
they will not fall under the "all-in-one"-umbrella. I'm not saying  
that's a bad thing, diversity is a good thing and Gossip neither  
could or should target every possible group of users.

But before I crawl out of my skin, just because you happen to use  
Telepathy doesn't mean you need to have every protocol or feature  
supported by Telepathy in every client using it. It is one of the  
main reasons for having Telepathy in the first place. It's  
*perfectly* reasonable to implement an IRC client on top of the  
Telepathy framework without adding support for XMPP, AIM or other  
protocols.

> In the other hand gossip may gain of having a x-g-like UI for  
> chatrooms.
> I personally prefer the x-g way of displaying a MUC over gossip's
> current chatroom UI. When I compare gossip's chatroom window and x- 
> g's I
> see no big difference in supported features. I think x-g UI can be
> perfectly used for jabber chatrooms. Note that x-g is not xchat, x-g's
> ui is lot simpler and provide less (useless for common use cases)
> features.

What is it you like better in xchat (with or without gnome).

> The big question here is: what about having a group-chat-window  
> separate
> from private chats ? In gossip actually you have the group chat  
> embedded
> as tab in in the same window than private chats, I think it's not a  
> very
> good idea. Personally I prefer having a separate window because I keep
> jabber/irc chatroom open all the time even if I don't speak on the  
> room.
> For private chats I close the window as soon as I have nothing more to
> say to the person. So the idea to have a special window looking like
> x-g's window for all chatrooms is for me a better choice because I can
> auto-join all favorite chatrooms when gossip starts and having them  
> all
> in a window and keep that window open and ready to discuss on a irc
> channel or a jabber room.

If that is what we are targeting we could just as well implement it  
as a separate program all together. Which in my opinion isn't such a  
bad idea and add support for XMPP MUC and IRC in that and have Gossip  
for a more personal one-to-one use. That ways both the clients can be  
tailored to do their thing best.

> Maybe this difference between chatrooms and private chat is why nobody
> use jabber chatrooms. All jabber clients supports jabber chatrooms  
> like
> other private chats, that's not what users expect, they prefer the  
> x-g's
> way for group chats. That may be a reason why IRC is far more popular
> than jabber chatrooms even if jabber is a better and more modern
> protocol than IRC.

I'm pretty sure it's because IRC is already widely used and migrating  
a lot of people over is hard.

> That's just an idea, maybe I'm wrong and we should really make a
> separate application for IRC using telepathy instead of trying to  
> merge
> x-g and gossip together...

I don't think this can really be answered before we have a better  
idea on which features you hope to bring to Gossip by doing so.

Best Regards,
   Mikael Hallendal

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