Bug 24220

Sorry, no-one is going to work on this. If you want this kind of thing, please use another client.

That was disappointing.

Patches accepted.

Other IRC clients that do this: quassel and smuxi.


I understand (patches accepted).  But I think I'm more likely to write a client from scratch than to try to implement it within this framework.  Just like everybody else, apparently :/

Empathy bug closed invalid some time ago which I guess led me to open this bug:  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=596696

IRC logs that lead me to open this bug, from #telepathy, around when it was opened:


--- Log opened Wed Aug 05 13:16:51 2009
15:25 < Darxus> I run a text/console irc client on my server under screen because the ability to instantly reattach to all my chat stuff from anywhere (that has ssh and internet access) is very important to me.
15:25 < Darxus> For years I've wanted a gui client that also had that ability.
15:26 < Darxus> I don't suppose there are any plans to impliment anything like that with empathy?
15:26 < Darxus> ..Break the client into a client/server model, where the UI is the client, and everything else is the server, and they can run on different machines?
15:26 < Darxus> I realize I can get something similar with vnc.
15:27 < Darxus> (It would also be nice to have a text/console ui for when I want to connect from a computer I can't install the UI on.  And then a browser app UI would be fun.)
15:49 < Mithrandir> Darxus: it's called headless chicken and chickenless head and is a mythic beast that's been talked about for a few years already.
15:49 < Darxus> Mithrandir: Thank you.
15:49 < Mithrandir> there's no code to do it, though
15:50 < Darxus> I inferred.
15:50 < Mithrandir> I've pondered doing an irssi backend for telepathy, but not found the round tuits to do it yet.
15:50 < Darxus> I wonder if it would be easier to add to empathy or start from scratch :/
15:50 < Darxus> Mithrandir: How would you connect to irssi (which is the client I'm running)?
15:51 < Mithrandir> irssi has pluggable backends, so I'd just write a telepathy backend.
15:51 < Darxus> Nice.
15:51 < Mithrandir> my irssi is running in screen, so ssh + screen -r
15:51 < Darxus> It would be nice to stop using bitlbee :)

(In reply to comment #4)
> 15:49 < Mithrandir> Darxus: it's called headless chicken and chickenless head
> and is a mythic beast that's been talked about for a few years already.
> 15:49 < Darxus> Mithrandir: Thank you.
> 15:49 < Mithrandir> there's no code to do it, though

It's less "patches accepted" and more "if you write it, telepathy.freedesktop.org could host it" to be honest - there shouldn't be any need to patch anything to get a proof-of-concept for this idea, "just" write new stuff, so it should be its own project/git repository/releases.

Using Telepathy would avoid having to invent your own UI(s) and protocol backend(s), just the bit in the middle between the server and the clients. I think you'd probably want:

* a session bus on the server
* Mission Control running normally on the server
* a new Connection Manager representing the remote accounts, on the client
* (probably) a "master" Account on the client which represents the
  connection to the server itself, and never receives normal IMs
* (probably) a Mission Control plugin on the client which makes Accounts
  corresponding to the remote Accounts appear when the "master" Account
  is connected

To make it nice, you'd also probably want some way for the client to ask the server to replay the messages that arrived while it was offline, but a first implementation would be "backdated messages all arrive at once when you connect", like in bip/irssi-proxy.

There doesn't seem much point in having a bug open here if none of the current Telepathy developers are likely to work on it, which I think is why Jonny closed this one.

Yeah, having no familiarity with any of that, it sounds like it would be easier to start from scratch than use telepathy :/

Is there documentation that's likely to change that perception?