2008/9/22 Brian Pepple bpepple@fedoraproject.org:
If empathy didn't have a hard requires on some of it's plugins, like telepathy-haze (which pulls in libpurple) that would drop 20MB or more. IMO, the only hard-requires for empathy should probably be telepathy-gabble (XMMP) & telepathy-salut (local-link XMMP), the rest we should give a hard look at what we want to use a default in comps to reduce some of the bloat.
That would make it basically only useful for GTalk users which has significant market share only in North America and parts of the Middle East[1]. I don't think there is any kind of upstream story for how you install plugins outside of dropping to a terminal and using yum/apt-get either.
[1] http://billionsconnected.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/global_im_marke...