Fallback plan if Empathy isn't ready for Karmic?

[Jordan Mantha]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 11:04 AM, Andrew
Sayers<andrew-ubuntu-devel at pileofstuff.org> wrote:
> There's currently a big push to make Empathy the default IM client in
> Karmic, even though the version in Jaunty still has grave issues - for
> example, MSN doesn't work at all for me[1].

I'm assuming there will be a lot of upstream resources going into this
as it seems to be the big issue preventing Empathy from being fairly
"feature complete" for average use (along with maybe OTR) compared to
Pidgin.

> The plan is to make sure that these bugs are all fixed in time for
> Karmic, but what's the backup plan if there are still showstoppers when
> the release starts to get closer?  More precisely, when, where and how
> should people speak up if Empathy still has showstopping bugs?

Well, people should just be filing bugs. As the Desktop Team tracks
the bugs that are coming in they can milestone them, push them
upstream, and get a general overview of Empathy's suitability as
default. I believe the spec calls for the final evaluation at Feature
Freeze (August 27th). My guess would be that Empathy makes it. Being
promoted to the default Ubuntu app would be quite motivating to
developers I'd think and they want to make a good impression.

> Obviously it would be undesirable to try retrofitting Pidgin back in
> after the feature freeze, but I could see arguments for requiring
> notification earlier (default apps need more time) or later (Pidgin's
> already been well tested).

Feature Freeze is the defining milestone for this sort of thing in
Ubuntu. Putting Pidgin back in would be a very easy thing to do since
it's already default and it's going to be removed from Ubuntu
altogether or anything like that. It should be just a
s/empathy/pidgin/ in the desktop seed.

-Jordan