Offline contacts not shown by default

I can confirm that Empathy does not respect the Gconf setting (apps > empathy > ui > show_offline).

As Luca mentioned on IRC, this change is marked as being released upstream (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=612448). Whether this function used to work or not is currently unknown, so it could be a regression or it might not be.

The option has not be enabled in lucid because the change was late in the cycle

Anyway it was broken upstream and is now fixed.

2010/4/20 Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden>:
> The option has not be enabled in lucid because the change was late in
> the cycle

Sorry, I don't understand what this means: that option should come
from upstream (as Guillaume said). Does Ubuntu "overwrite" it in some
way?

Sebastien, plese also note that the behavior wasn't switched in ubunt package (the default GConf value file is TRUE, i.e. show offline contacts). Simply, there is (was, as Guillame said) a bug that prevents this setting to be respected at runtime.

Guillame, here is any specific commit in git.gnome.org that fixed the issue?

This was fixed in 2.30.0.2, which will be available as a SRU (Stable release update).

Hm, the bug trail is confusing here: Does this update really change the _default_ setting to show offline users by default? I vigorously NACK this for SRU. In all the Ubuntu releases so far, only online contacts were shown (which makes a lot of sense, too, otherwise it becomes utterly hard to find the person you actually want to talk to due to list overflow).

If this is about fixing empathy to respect a changed default gconf setting (but not actually change the default in gconf), that's fine. But we certainly do not want to change the out of the box behaviour in an SRU.

The behavior I observed was that Empathy was not following the gconf setting. When I checked gconf, the offline contacts were selected to be shown (this was default, I didn't change it) but Empathy still was hiding the offline contacts. So this is not a request to change the default, but to have Empathy follow the gconf settings.

Martin, this is exactly the reason I asked for urgency in this issue... I'll try to summarize this again, hoping someone from Canonical Design Team could join this thread to confirm the desirer behavior.

* Canonical Design Team performed an usabilty study on Empahy
* One suggestion was show offline contacts by default
* A bug on b.g.o was filed and fixed, with a simple s/no/yes in .schemas file
* Something goes wrong, due to a change in gconf "path" [1]
* Nobody seen the issue, maybe used to "old" default
* I filed this bug
* Guillaume fixed in upstream (see [1])
* The fix will appear in Ubuntu 10.04 when we'll update empathy package to 2.30.0.2 or 2.30.1

So, yes, the "visible" effect will be change the (old) default setting and show offline contact, the actual effect will be honour the (new) default setting. Not so fun situation, yeah.

> In all the Ubuntu releases so far, only online contacts were shown (which makes a lot of sense,
> too, otherwise it becomes utterly hard to find the person you actually want to talk to due to list overflow).

See linked b.g.o 612448 or ask Design Team ;)
Patching empathy in ubuntu in order to use old default could be a contradiction: a change sponsored by Canonical refused by Ubuntu...
Plus, if I'm right, the Empathy manual was changed to respect current actual setting (show offline).

[1] http://git.gnome.org/browse/empathy/commit/?h=gnome-2-30&id=c540250dd9a84efcc84330ed82e7e1e87255bbeb

Thanks for the clarification, Luca!

Didier, I rejected the current upload. Changing the bug that the new gconf key is not respected is great, of course, but at least for an SRU we should also change that gconf key to be "do not show hidden users". Didier, can you please reupload with that change (and drop the reference to this bug?)

s/hidden/offline/, of course; sorry

Changing the default behaviour should not be done in a stable update

This is fixed in Ubuntu 10.10 now. The key has been changed to "/apps/empathy/ui/show_offline". Thanks for reporting.