Konversation, Quassel and Kubuntu 9.10

[Jonathan Thomas]

On Thursday 23 July 2009 8:55:49 am Harald Sitter wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Jonathan Thomas<echidnaman at gmail.com> 
wrote:
> > On Thursday 23 July 2009 4:26:34 am Harald Sitter wrote:
> >> On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 3:58 AM, Jonathan Jesse<jjesse at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > +1 for me on replacing Quassel, never really enjoyed or cared for it.
> >> > seemed like a quick fix for something that was needed at the time, got
> >> > some attnetion put on a project but in kubuntu-users mailing list
> >> > there seems to be asked this question a lot.
> >>
> >> To be completely honest, I don't think the wiki page helps with
> >> deciding.
> >
> > Why not? It gives very precise features that Konversation has that
> > Quassel doesn't. The vaguest one seems to be KDE4 integration, which I
> > expound upon below the chart and in this email.
>
> v    that is why
>
> >> Most of the features listed are only important from a specific POV
> >> (e.g. I do not care about DCC at all, someone who does filesharing
> >> using it probably does care about its support), so the only really
> >> valid ones (IMHO) are "KDE integration", "stability" and "Kubuntu
> >> intregration" (actually usability also has its share, but since we
> >> can't simply assign a value or something, we need to rely on seele's
> >> opinion :)).
> >
> > Yes, none of these are major things. But they add up. Konversation has
> > admittedly had many more years of polish to get where it is, and it
> > shows.
>
> As I told you on IRC, you can turn that list around and mention what
> Quassel got that Konversation doesn't, to me the wiki page reads like
> a lot of FUD
>

Really? You can? I dare you to add those to the list then. (I personally don't 
see any features aside from those nifty URL previews that Konvi lacks.)

> > We could definitely ask kubuntu-users (I'll do that after I reply to
> > this. I think I can ask, in a quite non-biased manner), although I have a
> > pretty good question about what their consensus would be already. ;-)
>
> I don't want a consensus, I want to hear what they miss in
> Quassel/Konversation, or what annoys them about them, or what they
> like best...
>

Sounds fair enough.

> This is not just a choice of using the currently most appropriate app,
> because _any_ app switch is bad and thus I personally will not support
> another IRC client switch within the next couple of cycles. So we need
> to decide which client is going to be the most appropriate one for the
> next couple of years, so we can commit, to a certain degree, to help
> upstream improve the application and by this making our users happier.
> Ultimately it's not about how many features an application got (then
> KDE would have a market share of 99% or something), it's the features
> + quality +  ease of use + overall support + development progress...
> If features were any indication whether an application should be
> default or not, we could just run a script to count the SLOC and then
> go with the most.

This would definitely be the last IRC app switch we would need for years. We 
would be getting behind an active, rock-hard stable and KDE4-integrated IRC 
client with KDE-supported documentation and translation that has a many-years 
head start on the competition.

I really believe that we should see Quassel for what it was; a temporary 
solution filling an important gap, the need for which is over.
>
> regards,
> Harald