Messaging/Video Conferencing/VOIP, selection

Work items:
get the current version in karmic: DONE
don't install ekiga by default: DONE
get empathy and its depends promoted and installed by default: DONE
look at feedback from users at feature freeze and decide what to use for karmic: DONE

pitti, 2009-07-15: empathy is in the default install now, and on the CDs. Needs some small cleanup still (deciding about -butterfly vs. -haze)

bryanquigley 2009-08-22: friendly ping, we are 5 days from feature freeze, what's the status of the decision (also consider pidgin is getting VV support now)? And how/where is user feedback being collected? Thanks!

rickspencer3 2009-08-22: bryanquigley - thanks for the ping. So far as I can tell, the community seems pretty split. For my part, I am in favor of the current plan of sticking with empathy but continuing to support pidgin fully. It seems to be moving the distro forward, and so long as Empathy is reasonably stable, I don't see any reason to change. Again, we love pidgin, and don't plan to stop supporting it. Fundamentally though, I don't want to seriously engage in such a discussion until seb128 is back (week after next). Thanks again.

rickspencer3 2009-08-22: oops. I should have added, in terms of Feature Freeze. If we needed, I'm sure we could get a FF exception to switch back to pidgin, though the timing for such a change is no so good.