KDE Telepathy and Kubuntu

[David Edmundson]

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 10:26 AM, Jonathan Riddell <jriddell at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> KDE Telepathy is nicely packaged in Kubuntu (thanks to Rohan and
> others) and working great for me.  So nice to see IM progressing in
> KDE again.
>
> We are still pondering if it's suitable for our forthcoming 12.04
> release (due April) which is long term support so we tend to be nervous about
> changing to new programmes.  I'm all for it but I have a Kubuntu dev
> community to convince :)
>

I'm no longer sure it's a great idea. I'm definitely all for it being
available in the repos, that's fantastic, and the feedback we've got
already has already (mostly) been useful.
But in terms of making it the default client we miss the entire window
of wider testing that being available (but not default) will bring.

One of the things that has been best about KDE Tp is that we've
managed to develop alongside Kopete and avoid all the flak of "Kopete
did this, you don't, you suck!!!", as soon as we become default we'll
have to deal with all that on a daily basis from millions of horrible
fucktard users. Whilst being in Kubuntu is great for our reputation
short term, long term it may actually be a hindrance and give us a bad
rep' as an unfinished product, as well as one for Kubuntu.

We also have to maintain 0.3 for as long as LTS is supported, I think
we'll be fine maintaining it for 6 months, but for 3 years, I'm not so
sure? Given how fast paced we are, I think that will be an issue,
backporting anything in the lib is already sometimes tricky, due to
large rewrites. Despite my best intentions I know realistically I
personally won't be arsed after a few months.

Also 0.3 lacks a log viewer, TLS handler, and we still don't know what
we're doing with Kopete log importing. This latter decision could
seriously affect/delay the log viewer I wrote for 0.4.

It may be better to wait, and do it properly rather than rush and have
everyone hate us.

Sorry to be a pessimist.

Dave.

> It seems that message indicator support is a bit of a dealbreaker for
> many as it is a major UI change to drop that.  Kopete and Quassel have
> support for this built in which Konversation has a patch for it
>
> http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/precise/konversation/precise/view/head:/debian/patches/message-indicator/0001-Adds-support-for-Message-Indicator.diff
>
> a random comment:
> "BTW, "Telepathy Contact List" is totally going to confuse people.  Not that "Kopete" is much better, but at least current users are used to it."
>
> Another request is
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ktp-approver/+bug/947430
> "Clicking on bubbles in KDE telepathy notifications doesn't work"
>
> There are problems a few other requets Kubuntu people have.  These are
> only requests to help convince the community to change to KDE
> Telepathy for 12.04.  We know you're all busy on 100 others things so
> if you don't want to look at the above in the near future that's very
> understandable, Kubuntu will certainly change for 12.10 anyway.
>
> Jonathan
> _______________________________________________
> KDE-Telepathy mailing list
> KDE-Telepathy at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-telepathy