Those curious to give Empathy a try are welcome to do so. To get rationale why it was done, continue reading.
All the software needed to interact with classic mobile phones became defunct over last few years, so I decided to maintain GNOME Phone Manager for my own needs. It was easy until desktop moved to Wayland and GtkStatus icons stopped working, therefore significant refactor was needed and now it is GTK4 app using GNotification and conversation view, but conversations are kept in memory only.
Here I need to decide to either implement some kind of permanent storage or use something already done. Fortunately Phonemgr has Telepathy plugin and Telepathy solves all those things and much more (roster for contacts is just neat).
So let’s try to switch perspective a bit. What if Empathy still works on modern desktop? What if it supports currently used messaging channels? There was some effort invested into Maemo, so we could have that almost for free.
Now Empathy is updated so it builds and runs on Debian 13 with a few bugs fixed. This topic hopefully answers how much desired is having Empathy back as moving to GTK4 is possible, but still not free; not mentioning work on Telepathy itself.
Normally I would just open a merge request, but there is nothing left to open it against, so eventual review of changes I made is welcome and appreciated. Thank you!
Empathy and, to a lesser extent, Telepathy are essentially dead projects: there’s nothing to “revive”.
I would recommend starting from scratch, instead of trying to raise them both from the dead; there are better ways to deal with contacts and storage, these days, than the massively over-engineered Telepathy spec and its implementations.
It is a bit strange mentioning better ways without any pointers. Could you be more specific?
Telepathy is well engineered, that’s actually what I like. And starting from scratch over and over without actually having anything mature is something I’d like to avoid.
I was unable to answer the question I was asking myself: Did Empathy died by the lack of users or by lack of developers? Bringing it alive could help answering that. (I spent quite some time reading thru gitlab and got a pretty dark picture. Many open merge requests without reactions even for core projects)
Storing contacts can be done using any database, like SQLite through GOM; or, preferably, using tinysparql to store a whole identity.
It’s really not, unless you’re trying to solve the problem of supporting as many protocols as you can in the most inefficient way possible, to allow for closed source protocols. You can read all about it from the perspective of one of the people that worked on it, back in the Nokia days.
I’m sorry for not being more specific. Question of course was not how to store data, but how to solve all the messaging circus. Telepathy solves all that at the cost of just tiny bridge (now at 3256 lines total).
Thank you for that pointer. Strangely enough, current Maemo developers are still using Telepathy framework despite above warning and invested considerable effort into it.
To be clear (as I feel discussion shifts undesired way), I’m not pushing anything. I’m trying to figure out interest in previously in use solution. With enough interest I’ll invest more effort into coding because I’m a bit shy showing lazy code. With no interest I’ll just hack it until it works for me.