[sylpheed:31648] Re: adding an Instant Messenger to sylpheed to offer it to openoffice

[Attila Kinali]

On Sat, 18 Aug 2007 20:24:58 +0200
"Michael Schmidt" <schmidtm524 at googlemail.com> wrote:

> On 8/18/07, N.Novozhilov <nna at darim.com> wrote:
> > That is not so good idea, I think.
> > I'm using PIDGIN for online communications under Linux and Miranda
> > under Windows (home comp), and both are working very well.
> >
> > BTW, GUI language is GTK, which you have to install for using Sylpeed.
> 
> 
> thanks for the quick feedback,
> 
> why is it in your eyes not a good idea? and which do you mean?

Probably because of the deep feeling of anyone doing unix
for quite some time, that an application should do one thing,
and only one thing but this very good instead of trying to do
everthing, but nothing really works.

Instead applications should try to seamlessly interact with each
other so their functionalities can be combined. But unfortunately
what works so well for CLI applications doesn't for GUI. Mostly
because there is no standard on how these should interact
(there is no notion of a graphical pipe) and because most GUI
programmers suffer from the NIH syndrome.

> Pidgin and Miranda are very good, yes, but not serverless and do not
> offer email and do not offer a secure synchronization of OOo Documents
> among collaborating teammembers.

I have the strong feeling that you are trying to solve a problem
with the wrong tools. IM clients are meant for realtime communication
between people and not for synchronisation and collaboration in
teams.


> I guess you have not followed the Thunderbird discussion,
> 
> Mozilla opened the discussion of outsourcing Thunderbird,
> The result is a new company for Thunderbird and a new roadmap for thunderbird:
> With Instant Messaging and Jabber.

And Thunderbird is something that noone in his right mind would
consider to use. It's huge, does most thing only half assed
and so slow that i can type faster than it displaying the characters
(try that with sylpheed!).

> One focus was, to get Thunderbird to OpenOffice,org as OOo needs an
> email client and as well an Instant Messenger.

OOo neither needs an email nor an IM client IMHO. It's already
bloat enough with all the integration done.
 
> So... would it be possible to add the
> rs core to your Sylpheed gui quick**? Just the main frames:
> login/creat account, friendslist, personal chat window, file browse,
> options for adjusting the router.

Nothing goes quick in software. And what i know from the structure
of sylpheed it is not very well made to handle IM like stuff.


> (1) RS IM in the mailclient would offer secure file transfer and
> syncronization, this would be a good application for OOo-users working
> on common documents. So they can send it safe and secure to other
> users.

Use either an RCS (svn, mercurial, git,...), a WebDAV based repo
or just some fileserver somewhere. OOo documents are not really
ment to be written by more than one guy at a time anyways.


> Now the community needs an desktop client, saving all data on the hard
> disc of the users and not at google or a central server, that brings
> online (presence, IM) and offline (email) communication together.

Again, bringing everything together under the hood of one application
is a bad bad bad bad bad bad bad idea.

> (4) see the Rs RFC in the Forum. email 2.0 is defined as email not
> only to "@" adresses, but as well to PGP-Adresses serverless (this is
> the way, email in RS works). So soon you well be able to send email
> serverless to PGP adresses!! If you defined them before in your
> friendslist / adressbook. this is a whole new definition of email and
> Sylpheed should be part of it! So the new serverless protocol (rs)
> could offers this in combination with Sylpheed client, see the RS RFC
> in the forum.

I think that those people have slightly missunderstood what email is
and what its real problems are.

> As this is just a simple gui question and the OOo people alread
> knocked on rs doors, we could then offer the mail-messenger, as the
> amalgamation of Sylpheed+RS.

It is not a simple question. What you ask for is a whole new submodule
within sylpheed. From the way you asked your question i have to
assume that you've never wrote a bigger piece of software. I'll suggest
you that you should try to learn programming yourself and implement
it with sylpheed to see how much work it really is.

BTW: full quotes are bad manner on mailinglists, you shouldn't do that.


			Attila Kinali
-- 
Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the waters,
But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my thirst!
                         -- Deed of Morred