[Telepathy] future of Telepathy?

[Alexandr Akulich]

Hi.

I'm slowly "coming" with Qt-based Telegram Connection Manager and work
(with a lower priority) on (qxmpp-based) XMPP Connection Manager.

Almost nobody needs telegram (whatsapp, whatever) client without
multimedia messages, and, as there is no any (reference) CM
implementation, it is not implemented in clients.
Telepathy specs have some words about media messages and I can quickly
add initial implementation in in the CM, but it doesn't make sense
without a client. I work on KTp and so far I implemented only Geo
messages receiving in KTp Text UI. Images and Video messages don't fit
in current ktp internal implementation and KTp needs to be
significantly refactored to support non-text messages. The changes
would be complex and it would take a long time to mainstream them
without regressions. I'm going to release Telepathy-Morse (Telegram
CM) with experimental geo and image messages receiving support
sometime soon and may be after the release someone will step up and
implement media messages in Empathy.

I'm sorry, I have just a little time to work on this and despite that
I said that I'll make the release months ago, it doesn't come out yet.
I'll not stop the work and just three days ago I fixed the biggest
showstopper issue.

On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 6:28 PM, Debarshi Ray <rishi.is at lostca.se> wrote:
> Hey Paul,
>
> On Sat, Apr 23, 2016 at 03:19:15PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
>> I note that there isn't much recent activity in the repos:
>>
>> https://cgit.freedesktop.org/telepathy
>
> You are right.
>
> With my GNOME hat on, we are not spending much effort on our instant
> messaging features. For a free software desktop, XMPP was by far the
> most useful and mature part of Telepathy. Google, Facebook and
> Microsoft has either moved away from XMPP or deprecated it, while
> Telegram and Whatsapp use something different.
>
> None of the XMPP-based free VoIP options ever worked reliably. They
> were spotty at best. So, even if Maemo used Telepathy for making GSM
> calls, it didn't offer much to GNOME.
>
> Some fringe and/or enterprisey protocols are supported via libpurple /
> telepathy-haze, but the quality tends to vary. Even if they do work,
> they are, by their very nature, not so appealing for the majority of
> users.
>
> That leaves IRC. The new GNOME IRC client, Polari, uses Telepathy, but
> one can argue that it would be better off without it. IRC was always a
> square peg trying to fit into a round hole, and Polari is not using
> many of the features offered by Telepathy (eg., multiple
> special-purpose clients).
>
> Add to this the fact that all the original Telepathy maintainers have
> left. (I am not part of the original crew, and was only involved in
> certain parts of the stack.)  Sometimes I look at a bug-fix or spin a
> tarball, mostly because I am involved with Telepathy maintenance in
> Fedora and RHEL, but its very rare.
>
> Given how hard it is to support any of the popular instant messaging
> networks, a free software IM stack looks increasingly pointless. Maybe
> someone will come up with a mature Telegram implementation ...
>
> Cheers,
> Rishi
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