[Gossip-dev] Nokia released Mission Control

[Xavier Claessens]

On dim, 2007-03-11 at 11:34 +0100, Tomasz Sterna wrote:
> Dnia 10-03-2007, sob o godzinie 12:42 +0100, Xavier Claessens
> napisał(a):
> > Basically the MC is a layer on top of telepathy that manage accounts.
> > This allow to make a very small separate UI program for each aspect of
> > an full IM client. For example we can have one program to manage
> > contact
> > list, one for private chat, etc.
> > 
> > The big question here is: Do we keep GossipJabber backend ? I think it
> > won't be possible to keep a no-telepathy backend if we want a good MC
> > (and desktop) integration, or at least it will need more work and I'm
> > not sure there is still developers that have time to take care of this
> > (old) backend. 
> 
> Could we use MC to manage not only telepathy but also Gossip (and other)
> accounts? Perhaps extending MC to do it and submitting it back.

No, the MC is a layer on top of telepathy, it depends completely on it.
The big difference is an account connected using telepathy can be
accessed via dbus, so we can have many clients that use the same
connected account, that's fundamental to integrate IM in the desktop
which is the goal of MC. 

> I'm no big fan of telepathy. It's nice, yes.
> But it also bounds us. We cannot do and experiment with things that
> telepathy does not handle (yet). It also depends us hardly on something
> we don't fully control.

We depend on Gtk, should be recode it to be sure to fully control it? Do
one think but do it well, gossip is an IM client not an IM protocol
backend. I totally convinced that telepathy is THE solution for all IM
UI.

> Gossip is a nice Jabber (XMPP in future maybe) client. One of the
> nicest. Dropping backend support in favor of telepathy would make it
> just another telepathy frontend.

No, gossip is yet-another-jabber-client with nothing really special,
moving to telepathy opens the door to a new world of desktop integration
and would make gossip really interesting.

For me it's simple, move to telepathy or die. Traditional clients like
gaim which re-implement all protocols has no future, it can't be easily
integrated with other desktop applications and has too many code
duplication with other traditional IM clients.

Take a simple example in gossip the telepathy backend supporting VoIP
and all possible IM protocols with almost the same features as the
jabber backend takes 6923 lines of code, gossip's jabber backend that
can't do msn/irc/etc and without VoIP takes 13691 lines of code... Using
telepathy we support far more with the half of code, that's the proof
there is a lot of code duplication in traditional IM clients.

Xavier.