The Silent Number

Posted: 2009-06-16

Silly me-- I had heard that Empathy was discussed at UDS, but i didn't realize that, as pointed out on my last post as well as the forum thread, the decision had already been made to include Empathy instead of Pidgin and Ekiga in Ubuntu Karmic 9.10. This is great! Karmic will be shipping with Empathy so that testing and fixing can be done, and if it's not satisfactory, it can be pulled for the final release.

The discussion so far has been people arguing about why they prefer Empathy or Pidgin, but at UDS it was already decided that Empathy would ship with Karmic. I humbly request that we all stop bickering about any problems we may currently have with it, and start testing it and filing bug reports so that it will ready for Karmic. I encourage everyone to participate in the upcoming Hug Day for Empathy on June 18th. 14 pages of discussion about the current state of things does nothing.

The consensus is that Empathy, by using the Telepathy framework and integrating with the GNOME desktop, is superior to Pidgin and should be included with Ubuntu by default eventually. Almost everyone who opposes it does so on the grounds that some bugs make it premature for such a thing to happen in Karmic, but since Karmic already has so many other major changes planned anyways and Karmic +1 will be an LTS, the decision has already been made for us. So let's make the best of it!