KDE Telepathy as part of KDE Applications

[Bardur Arantsson]

On 2017-08-02 20:15, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> El dimecres, 2 d’agost de 2017, a les 18:44:17 CEST, Christoph Feck va 
> escriure:
>> On 02.08.2017 17:52, Martin Klapetek wrote:
>>> Hey guys,
>>>
>>> I was long thinking about writing this email but kept putting it off,
>>> but I think it's only fair towards everyone, especially our users so
>>> here it goes finally.
>>>
>>> The KDE Telepathy project is as of now unmaintained for over
>>> a year. That means there is no active development nor bugfixes
>>> except a few occasional patches from an uncooperative guy.
>>> Nobody is handling the incoming bugs. The protocol support is
>>> outdated, the KAccounts project is unmaintained (including the
>>> upstream), I'm not sure about the upstream Telepathy project
>>> but my guess is that it's also not in active development anymore
>>> either.
>>>
>>> As the last maintainer of KDE Telepathy and KAccounts, I feel like
>>> we're doing our users a disservice by shipping such outdated and
>>> unmaintained software. Therefore I'd like to recommend to stop
>>> shipping KDE Telepathy (all the ktp-* packages) as part of KDE
>>> Applications, if just to not give the impression that this is still being
>>> developed.
>>>
>>> But I'd like to leave it at that - a recommendation from the previous
>>> maintainer. If you guys still think it's worth being shipped, it's ok if
>>> you continue so. I just wanted you to be aware of the state of the
>>> project that we ship as our main IM solution.
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>> --
>>> Martin Klapetek | KDE Developer
>>
>> Looking at the bug tracker, we receive some bugs for KAccounts, but
>> virtually none for other KTP components. Either nobody uses those (in
>> this case I have no objections for your proposal), or they work fine,
>> which means I see no reason to stop shipping them.
>>
>> Note that we have literally hundreds of "unmaintained" modules,
>> including many games and edu apps in KDE Applications. Our general
>> policy is to move them out only when they are no longer buildable or
>> usable, and nobody steps up to fix that.
> 
> Agreed, it doesn't seem to be "horribly broken", so shipping it for those that 
> still use it makes sense imho.

I just want to point out that there's a *huge* difference between games
(which usually don't actively rely on the network) and "IM clients"
(which do).

If the IM protocols in Telepathy are not being actively being maintained
and kept up to date, they're effectively "horribly broken"[1].

If that's the case, I would suggest removing them as soon as possible
simply to avoid the negative PR.

[1] Unfortunately. All the major providers seem to just change things
arbitrarily, if not maliciously.

Regards,