Public bug reported:
Binary package hint: empathy
There are three main online presence statuses:
available, away and busy.
The first is obvious, the second should hopefully also be managed
automatically by the software, and the third one...
The third one is at least a little bit controversial, but i think we can
sum its purpose this way: you have for whatever reason your client and
connection loaded (it does automatically starts on login or whatever),
but you don't want to be bothered
Programs should shield the user from having to manage manually these
things, so they shouldn't care about the implementation difference in
these...
Unfortunately, due to technical limitations in the library or political
decision from the companies managing the serves, not every service may
supply all the relevant statuses...
Let's look at the purpose of the statuses:
Available: you want to let all the other contacts that may need/want to address
you that you're online
Away: you want to warn all the contacts that you may not be able to answer
because you are right away
Busy: you want to let everybody know that you don't want to be contacted right
now (except maybe for VERY important reasons, the ones that tipically require
that you shouldn't rely on a IM service to deliver), and if you're online
shouldn't matter to them.
Right now, empathy as a problem concerning the busy status: when the
user selects this status, his priority is clearly that of NOT being
contacted, but instead, if the service doesn't support a busy status
(i'm thinking of facebook right now) he's displayed as available (and he
doesn't even know about it, because the GUI doesn't tell you that!)
This means that it's instead very likely that he will we contacted, and
that's the thing the user didn't want on the first place...
To solve this, by giving more importance to the untraceability of the
user i think we should change our fallbacks and, when we know that a
service won't support a certain presence status (busy in this case) we
should fallback to:
busy
|→invisible ...the others won't be able to contact you... too bad, but that's a
lesser evil than the other way around
|→→→offline ...if invisible isn't supported either, not being able to see the
others that are online is again way less important than displaying yourself as
available (another problem is that you'll have to wait 2 seconds to connect
again when you'll want to be available again, but this is really an issue of
meager importance)
Obviously the fallback should act on a per-protocol basis, and if (but i
doubt ) it's needed, a config flag in the preferences could be added to
revert the behaviour to the old default
This may be seen as a limitation of facebook, but originally it made
sense: facebook chat was available only on the web site... and if you
were "socializing" on the web site, you were expected to be available
(or momentarily away) for others...
Obviously now, with the xmpp service available to IM client that are
always running in the background, this has become an issue, and even if
it could be considered a facebook issue, it's still a defect we can fix
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: empathy 2.32.0-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-22.35-generic 2.6.35.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-22-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: wl
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Oct 30 19:45:12 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100429)
ProcEnviron:
PATH=(custom, user)
LANG=it_IT.utf8
SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: empathy
** Affects: empathy (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
** Tags: amd64 apport-bug maverick ubuntu-une
--
When the user is busy, the status should be enforced
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/668833
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