Remove empathy, it now requires OpenGL

[greenfeld]

If #11810 cannot be fixed or worked around, then we need to remove applications from the builds which do not work.

One example program that currently does not work (and is believed to be due to clutter) is Empathy.

[dsd]

That's the first I've heard of empathy breakage. Can you elaborate on the problems? What other shipped apps are affected?

[greenfeld]

Empathy simply dies on startup with a Segmentation fault before it even shows a window. If started from the GNOME launcher instead of a Terminal, the busy startup notice appears but eventually times out with no error message.

According to RPM, the packages that depend on libclutter-gst-1.0.so.0 appear to be cheese-libs, empathy, totem, and totem-mozplugin. Totem is likely used by the web browsers; I'm not certain who uses cheese-libs.

[pbrobinson]

In fallback mode it shouldn't use clutter code paths even if its built in. The fallback seems to work OK with totem. Any chance of a RHBZ bug with a backtrace?

[greenfeld]

I'm not sure what is quite going on here yet.

• If just run as "empathy" from the GNOME Terminal as started by the olpc user, it segfaults.
• If I run "su -" to root, optionally edit the ulimit for cores, and then "su - olpc" back to run empathy, I see "(empathy:3819): empathy-CRITICAL **: main: assertion `gtk_clutter_init (&argc, &argv) == CLUTTER_INIT_SUCCESS' failed"
• If I "su -" to root, "su olpc" back (not setting environment) and run empathy, we segfault.

I set the ulimit the last way and obtained a core file, but why we are segfaulting in some environments but not the other probably should be determined before complaining upstream.

[dsd]

Confirmed that empathy fails on startup due to not being able to initialise clutter. I looked at the source code, and confirmed that it calls into clutter early on and fails app startup if clutter isn't happy.

Maybe this could be improved in future: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=678343

For now, as agreed in the 12.1.0 meeting, we will drop empathy from the build. If this is missed by a deployment, we encourage pidgin to be considered as a replacement.

Another option would be to recompile empathy without video call support. This would likely avoid the problem. We aren't in the business of maintaining our own packages in this way, but we could possibly do it on-demand if it would help a deployment.

[dsd]

Test in 12.1.0 build 15.

[greenfeld]

Empathy has been removed in 12.1.0 os15.