Hi all, We've recently discussed this in a different thread, but I thought that it probably deserves one of its own.
In short: Empathy and Telepathy haven't got development time for quite a while, and the Empathy UX isn't great. At the same time, popular chat protocols are mostly closed nowadays, meaning that having a built-in chat client potentially isn't as important as it used to be. Possible ways to deal with the situation: 1. Advertise for new contributors/maintainers to either revamp the existing Empathy UI, or create a new Telepathy-based chat client. 2. Based on the outcome of 1, reach out to other Telepathy users (primarily on the KDE side, I'm guessing), and see if we can organise more development. 3. Remove the existing Empathy integration in GNOME, particularly on the online accounts side, but also possibly the shell. This would effectively turn Empathy into a third-party application. 4. Recommend to distros that Empathy shouldn't be installed by default, and change the logic of Software so that it isn't mandatory. 5. Tell users that Empathy is no longer recommended (could be done through Software, or through Empathy itself, or something else). These options could be combined in different ways... My personal view is that the GNOME community ought to be given the opportunity to pursue option 1 if it wants to, and that the Release Team could make an announcement to that effect. At the same time, I don't feel that chat is all that high a priority, and would probably encourage people to work on other things (Music, Notes, Photos or Videos in particular). If option 1 doesn't work out, we can discuss 3, 4 and 5. Allan _______________________________________________ release-team@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/release-team Release-team lurker? Do NOT participate in discussions.