The Silent Number

Posted: 2009-06-16

There has been lots of support as well as backlash for replacing Pidgin with Empathy in Ubuntu. Discussion has been going acruss multiple mailing lists and forum threads. Although Empathy has improved so much since Jaunty, it isn't perfect, and the pressure is even stronger now that we're approaching our next Long Term Support (LTS) release. 
We should include Empathy in Karmic or Karmic +1 and we should make and announce the decision of which now. 
If we do not include Empathy in Karmic, but plan on including it in Karmic +1 (and announce this) it will still give Empathy the attention it needs from developers to fix the bugs that would be considered regressions during the switch without actually replacing Pidgin before they're fixed. 
On the other hand, it might still be preferable to include Empathy in Karmic to have more of a guarantee that bugs will be fixed in time for the 10.04 LTS release and many of the existing bugs could be fixed before the final release of Karmic. As someone commented on my last post: 

Empathy has been the top active project in Gnome for the last few weeks, with about 100 commits a week on average. The pace of development is astounding. Once the move to Empathy is the default, Ubuntu can start depending on it for other applications' communication needs (using Tubes). Gnome Games are getting Tubes support. Vino just got Tubes support, meaning that you can share your desktop with your contacts in Empathy.

I understand why 8.04 didn't ship with Empathy, but the change needs to happen. Empathy is 95% there. The needed changes can be made before Karmic if Ubuntu (and Canonical) commits to it. If 9.10 ships with Empathy, all the major bugs will be worked out by 10.04. Who wants to add yet ANOTHER new technology to another LTS.