Empathy and Ekiga in Karmic Koala.

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad]

I'm very enthusiastic about Empathy taking over for Pidgin in Karmic.
I also think it would be great if we could collect all live
communication channels in one client, also making Ekiga redundant.

Testing Karmic Koala Alfa 3, I see that Ekiga has been removed from
the default desktop and that Empathy doesn't depend on
telepathy-sofiasip, meaning that Empathy doesn't support SIP out of
the box at all. I installed it and SIP was added as an account type in
Empathy. However, I'm not in any way able to connect to my SIP-PSTN
provider, which is quite easy with Ekiga. This means I'm going to have
to use Ekiga for the time being in any case.

Empathy also doesn't have a GUI for entering normal phone numbers and
dialing like Ekiga does. I think this would also have to be present
for Empathy to replace Ekiga. Having an applet for that and for
receiving calls, using Telepathy, would be great.

I understand the one-app-per-task philosophy, but I think it's too
early to remove Ekiga from the default install. I think we should have
both Empathy and Ekiga in this cycle. Hopefully, enough progress has
been made for LTS+1 to let Telepathy/Empathy take over. If the
assumption is, like the wiki suggests, that people doesn't use VoIP as
a replacement for normal phone calls, that assumption is just wrong
and we should have a good tool for users like me. :)

Best regards,

Jo-Erlend Schinstad