Empathy is unusable if indicator applet is not on the panel

Having the same problem. To use it, I open it via gnome-menus, so the empathy window opens, and I can use, and reply to my friends, as when i have new messages from a contact, the name of the contact stay blinking.

Same problem here. The Empathy icon does not show up in the panel, effectively rendering the messenger unusable.

I can confirm this problem and I found some more details. Simply, there is a bug in "logic" of the application settings. The indicator is missing from the notification area if "Use message indicator" IS checked in Empathy properties. In order to get the indicator on the panel, do NOT check "Use message indicator" and it's on.

I've attached two screenshots that present this issue.

Here is second part of my comment #3 with the second screenshot I promised to attach,

I can confirm Matueusz' observation: The panel icon appears if "Use message indicator" in Preferences --> Notifications is NOT checked. If checked, the icon disappears from the panel.

This seems to be working as designed then, is it not?

No, it is not, because the default now results in Empathy not having a panel icon.

As long as the indicator applet is visible, I can see new messages listed in its pull-down menu and don't need the empathy icon in the tray. However, the indicator applet does not seem to look any different when there are unseen messages, and so I don't realise that I have to check its menu - unless I am slightly blind and just didn't see it, that should probably be improved on.

By the way, I think there is some slight confusion in some of the comments above. It seems to me that the check box in the settings dialogue ("Use message indicators") means that empathy should use the indicator applet *instead of* its own panel icon for notification. Perhaps empathy *should* display its own icon though if the indicator applet is not running, regardless of the state of the check box.

Ah, now that I am paying attention I can see a difference in the appearance of the indicator applet. It is just very discreet, and in particular I didn't make the connection between that and new messages in empathy, as I am used to pidgin opening new tabs and flashing the taskbar.

@Michael, I agree the icon isn't clear enough. I would like to be animated when there is something waiting for me, like most of "action required" icons. At the same time, I am not sure that this belongs in this ticket.

David, not quite sure about the animation bit :), but otherwise I thought the same as you, so I opened bug 450398 for this.

The issue here is for users that don't have the indicator-applet loaded in their panel. In that case, we need to always display the icon to give users a way to get to empathy. I am working on that.

Agree, sorry for the off-topic comments.

But not having indicator-applet is a corner case, and if you are in that corner case, it's easy to work around by changing the settings.

It would be ideal to fix this before we ship, but at this point, we should rather be focused on crashers and such. Also, changes could introduce new bugs and instabilities.

Removing from karmic goals to focus on higher priority bugs

This makes no sense!

So you have 2 possibilities: 1) fix your crap. 2) Drop your crap.

It would be really sad that an ubuntu specific patch makes empathy crash at startup for all non-GNOME users, and users that just removed the indicator applet. We already got lots of bug reports in Empathy's bugzilla about that, all we can do is closing bugs NOTGNOME...

We worked hard in Empathy upstream to make it stable and ready for inclusion in all main distributions, please don't kill all that hard work now!

Why did you do that ? Ubuntu make choice to replace pidgin by empathy.
So you have to make usuable empathy...if dont...plz put pidgin instead
empathy in karmic release.

Bye...

Note that if empathy was last hidden in status icon last time you quit it, it will restart hidden. That means that if I remove the indicator applet in that situation, empathy won't show and I have no way to use it. I can't even go to preferences to uncheck "use message indicator".

This is critical and blocker for release.

Thanks !

First, I would ask all bug reporters to retain a respectful tone in their reporting and comments. I hardly think using the term "crap" to describe other people's software is conducive to a quality working relationship, and I hope that the two projects have a long term productive relationship for a long time in the future.

Note that setting the bug to "Won't Fix" did not express a lack of desire to fix the issue. Rather, I Won't Fixed the Bug Task specific to Karmic, meaning that I took it off the list of release blockers. Empathy still crashes in quite a few situations, and we need to focus on crashers in the remaining time we have for bug fixing in Karmic, as this bug has work arounds and does not effect the default case.

If anyone has a patch to fix this issue, please feel free to submit it asap, and we will gladly review it and include it if appropriate.

I'm happy to keep the bug task open as a Medium if it helps keep visibility on the bug until Lucid opens.

I took a quick look at the canonical patch adding libindicate support to empathy, but I couldn't see any way to tell whether the indicator applet was actually running - if someone can tell me how to tell that, I could do a quick untested patch, as the place in the code to change is pretty clear. Out of interest, why were these changes not submitted (or accepted) upstream? This sort of distro-specific stuff is just asking for problems.

On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 15:07 +0000, Michael wrote:
> I took a quick look at the canonical patch adding libindicate support to
> empathy, but I couldn't see any way to tell whether the indicator applet
> was actually running - if someone can tell me how to tell that, I could
> do a quick untested patch, as the place in the code to change is pretty
> clear.

The way to determine if the messaging menu is running is to use the
interests interface. It basically conveys if someone is interested in
the application that is running. The interest that should be used here
is: INDICATE_INTEREST_SERVER_SIGNAL. Meaning that a watcher is willing
to signal that the application can show/hide.

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~indicator-applet-developers/libindicate/trunk-0-2/annotate/head:/libindicate/interests.h

The signals are INTEREST_ADDED and INTEREST_REMOVED from here:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~indicator-applet-developers/libindicate/trunk-0-2/annotate/head:/libindicate/server.h

With the function to check being indicate_server_check_interest in the
same file.

> Out of interest, why were these changes not submitted (or
> accepted) upstream? This sort of distro-specific stuff is just asking
> for problems.

Awful presumptuous of you to assume that it hasn't :)

  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574744

> Awful presumptuous of you to assume that it hasn't :)
Sorry about that...
> The way to determine if the messaging menu is running is to use the
interests interface.
Messaging menu running == indicator applet running?

On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 16:28 +0000, Michael wrote:
> Messaging menu running == indicator applet running?

Yes. Though it's a little more generic than that in that if anyone was
to make a messaging menu like thing, and used libindicate, they could
also set this. So things like the messaging menu in XFCE and there is
also someone working on one for AWN. It's not really "applet specific".

Then my shot would be the following:

--- ./debian/patches/20_libindicate.patch.old 2009-10-14 20:47:45.263763496 +0200
+++ ./debian/patches/20_libindicate.patch 2009-10-14 20:51:00.443737342 +0200
@@ -1517,12 +1517,12 @@
 + gboolean use_libindicate)
 +{
 + EmpathyStatusIconPriv *priv = GET_PRIV (icon);
++ EmpathyIndicatorManagerPriv *manager_priv = GET_PRIV(priv->indicator_manager);
 +
-+ if (use_libindicate) {
++ if (use_libindicate && indicate_server_check_interest(manager_priv->indicate_server, INDICATE_INTEREST_SERVER_SIGNAL)) {
 + empathy_indicator_manager_set_server_visible (priv->indicator_manager,
 + TRUE);
 + /* Hide the status icon so there are not two ways to access empathy.
-+ * Should use libindicate's "interest" to confirm someone is listening.
 + */
 + gtk_status_icon_set_visible (priv->icon, FALSE);
 + } else {

This is a diff of a diff against 20_libindicate.patch from empathy 2.28.0.1-1ubuntu4, and has not even been tested to compile, but as I don't have much time and am just a bystander who doesn't even plan to be affected by this bug, that will have to do :) Ted, I am sure you can judge by looking whether that is at least sane, and someone who is actually affected can build and test.

Fix pushed to lp:~ubuntu-desktop/empathy/ubuntu

This bug was fixed in the package empathy - 2.28.0.1-1ubuntu6

---------------
empathy (2.28.0.1-1ubuntu6) karmic; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/20_libindicate.patch
    - display the status icon when the indicator isn't present (LP: #435329)
    - don't attach notifications to the status icon if the icon
      isn't visible, it was drawing a black line (LP: #434316)
  * debian/patches/30_raise_not_toggle.patch
    - Updated to apply cleanly

 -- Ken VanDine <email address hidden> Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:34:36 -0400

Confirmed fixed here. Now empathy gives an indication that it's running and I don't need to launch it again to get to the UI. Thanks for getting this fix into Karmic. Might actually give Empathy a try now!

Oops spoke too soon. Empathy doesn't seem to set any status at all on first launch, thereby not displaying anything on the panel. It should default to start with status set to offline or user preference. Also noticed the right-side panel icons shake like something is being added, but then nothing is displayed.

I need to launch empathy twice to get to the user interface. Seems there are three problems here:

1) empathy needs to launch with a status set
2) empathy UI should be shown on first launch
3) regardless of the first two problems, empathy should always display a panel icon if indicator applet is removed/disabled.

1) I think empathy always starts and sets the status to whatever it was when it quit last, at least it appears to for me. That wouldn't be related to this bug though.
2) The empathy contact list remembers the last known state, which using the status icon could be hidden and still exit. If you start it back up again, it will display the window if it was visible prior to the last exit. That behavior isn't related to the indicator, just how empathy was designed.
3) This isn't trivial, if you remove the indicator applet we don't actually know the indicator is no longer interested in empathy. There is a service that is running which doesn't get killed just by removing the applet. If you remove the applet then run "killall indicator-messages-service", you will see the status icon. Or, remove the applet, logout and back in. You will also see the status icon and no indicator applet. Hopefully in a future version of the indicator applet, it will stop the services it starts when it is removed.

1) I agree that it should. But, it does not. Every single time I first launch empathy in a new session, it starts with NO status whatsoever. This is also tested with a fresh user profile and a clean install of karmic beta. The only modification being that indicator applet is not added to the panel and is also not started with session via Startup Applications.
2) See #1. But also, as I had mentioned previously, on first launch, since there is no status whatsoever, it does not display a panel icon. Therefore, I need to launch it a second time to see the user interface. After the second launch, the contact list window displays, but it displays absolutely nothing for content. Just white space with a grayed-out star in the status drop-down and white space where contacts would be listed.
3) If indicator applet is not started, neither is the daemon. There is no indicator-messages-service running, so that would be irrelevant to this bug.

I should add for clarity that FUSA is not running either, hence no indicator related services.

Also, this bug, as filed, according to it's tile is NOT FIXED. I am not going to keep marking it confirmed so you can mark it fixed. It is a valid, open, unfixed bug. Please return it's status to reflect this fact.

I just tried to reproduce, in a pristine VM will all updates applied.

* Created a new user
* logged in and removed the indicator applet and the session applet (fusa replacement)
* logged out and back in again
* verified there were no processes related to the indicator running with ps
* started empathy for the first time, added my account and it signed me in and set me to online
* the status icon displayed as desired
* i then quit empathy and logged out
* logged back in again and started empathy
* the status icon was displayed and i my status was set to available

Seems to work as desired in a clean install, i am not sure what could be different in your setup.

Let me confirm, you are running GNOME right? Can you send me empathy logs?

Thanks for testing that. I was using the exact same STR in virtualbox. This made no sense until I created yet another new user account. The difference was that in empathy preferences, I had unticked "use message indicators" when testing on both my primary machine and the virtual environment.

That is one confusing and unintuitive setting, but that is beside the point. This bug is indeed fixed. I'll shut up now. Thanks again.

Aaarghhh. I really wish you could edit posts here.

This does not work after reboot. Just rebooted both primary machine and VM and both are still not showing anything when launching empathy for the first time following reboot.

Yes this is under karmic ubuntu gnome on both physical and virtual machines. VM is beta clean install + updates, new user profile with only aforementioned modifications to indicator applet, FUSA.

What logs should I be looking for? The only logs I am able to find are

chat logs under ~/.local/share/Empathy/logs
empty directory under ~/.gnome2/Empathy/logs/msn-haze0/contactName

Do i need to launch empathy with a debugging switch to get verbose logging or am I just not looking in the right place?

Only difference I can see is that you appear to be using msn via the haze backend (based on that directory structure), perhaps there is a bug in that backend that isn't setting your status properly on startup. Can you test the same setup but without haze?

I think if you create your msn account in Empathy with telepathy-butterfly installed, it will use the butterfly backend and give you a log directory in there that starts with butterfly-

To get the logs, in the contacts list menu, Help->Debug. In the selector at the top left, choose Empathy and then save. Do the same for whatever backend you are using, this will give you two logfiles. Please attach those to this bug.

Thanks

I tried this with butterfly and it behaves the same as google talk did. Opening the window each time i run it and setting the status on startup. Even after a reboot.

Here is the log from the telepathy version in the clean VM user. When it notes that another instance is running and displays the main window is when I launch it for a 2nd time. I gave it about 40 seconds between first and second launch, though the timestamps don't look very useful after the copy.

This log leads me to think there is an indicator running. Please confirm the indicator applet is not in the panel, and check for indicator processes with "ps auxww|grep indicator". Does that show anything is running?

Nope. No indicator running whatsoever. But, I've got this working properly on both installs. Two separate sets of issues made this more confusing than it needed to be. I apologize.

Physical machine: uninstalled empathy, removed anything under /home related to empathy, pidgin, haze, purple, mission-control. Reinstalled empathy. Working as expected now.

Virtual machine: Empathy was being blocked via default port 1863 by the firewall at work. Fortunately I am the sysadmin. Most IM clients can dynamically use port 80 these days, so I was a little slow on this. After waiting about 3-4 minutes from launching empathy, the panel icon eventually appeared and I could see there was a network problem.

Thanks for staying with me on this.Now, on to actually using this thing.

Great, please continue to file bugs and requests for improvements. We want to make it a truely great experience for Lucid.

why not make it a great experience for Karmic ?

maybe its obvious for you that this bug is "fix commited" or one can patch it himself, but the bug is still here, and empathy is not usable :(

run from gdb; empathy is stalled here:
(gdb) bt
#0 0x00110422 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
#1 0x02fecb6b in poll () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
#2 0x00aa553b in IA__g_poll (fds=0x82914e8, nfds=9, timeout=5000) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.22.2/glib/gpoll.c:127
#3 0x00a9855b in g_main_context_poll (context=0x816bb38, block=<value optimized out>, dispatch=1, self=0x808d028) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.22.2/glib/gmain.c:2904
#4 g_main_context_iterate (context=0x816bb38, block=<value optimized out>, dispatch=1, self=0x808d028) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.22.2/glib/gmain.c:2586
#5 0x00a98b8f in IA__g_main_loop_run (loop=0x82993a8) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.22.2/glib/gmain.c:2799
#6 0x05704419 in gtk_main () from /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
#7 0x0805be65 in ?? ()
#8 0x02f44b56 in __libc_start_main () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
#9 0x0805a7f1 in ?? ()

probably lost in a loop, or waiting for something.

aptitude search libindicat | grep ^i
i A libindicate-gtk1 - GNOME panel indicator applet - shared libr
i A libindicate-qt0 - Qt bindings for libindicate
i A libindicate3 - GNOME panel indicator applet - shared libr

is it supposed to work with this ?

Well this bug specifically is fix released, we added code to display the status icon when the indicator isn't in the panel and isn't running. That was the specific goal of this bug report.

Please file a bug, specifically explaining what you are doing to get this. Do you have the indicator applet in your panel? Are you running GNOME? What versions of the indicator do you have? (dpkg -l |grep indicator). Is empathy crashing? just not showing up? etc

To get a full backtrace, you need to dump the backtraces for all the threads. (gdb) thread apply all bt full

You can see http://live.gnome.org/Empathy/Debugging for more information for debugging.

Thanks

i am running xfce 4.6.1 (xubuntu jaunty upgraded to karmic with update-manager one week ago)

yesterday with xfce mailwatch 1.1.0 i could launch empathy (but still not connect to gmail due to another bug).
Since this morning upgrade, the bug came back, impossible to launch it.
I have installed indicator-applet (and 92 MB of other stuff for it :( ), but it seems it is not launched by xfce (and i dont know how to force it)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(gdb) thread apply all bt full

Thread 1 (Thread 0xb727d770 (LWP 6328)):
#0 0x00289422 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
No symbol table info available.
#1 0x03455b6b in poll () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
No symbol table info available.
#2 0x00bac53b in IA__g_poll (fds=0x82958b8, nfds=9, timeout=-1) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.22.2/glib/gpoll.c:127
No locals.
#3 0x00b9f55b in g_main_context_poll (context=0x816bb38, block=<value optimized out>, dispatch=1, self=0x808d028) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.22.2/glib/gmain.c:2904
        poll_func = 0xbac510 <IA__g_poll>
#4 g_main_context_iterate (context=0x816bb38, block=<value optimized out>, dispatch=1, self=0x808d028) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.22.2/glib/gmain.c:2586
        max_priority = 2147483647
        timeout = -1
        some_ready = <value optimized out>
        nfds = 9
        allocated_nfds = <value optimized out>
        fds = <value optimized out>
        __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ = "g_main_context_iterate"
#5 0x00b9fb8f in IA__g_main_loop_run (loop=0x829cd58) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.22.2/glib/gmain.c:2799
        self = 0x808d028
        __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ = "IA__g_main_loop_run"
#6 0x065f5419 in gtk_main () from /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
No symbol table info available.
#7 0x0805c03c in ?? ()
No symbol table info available.
#8 0x033adb56 in __libc_start_main () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
No symbol table info available.
#9 0x0805a841 in ?? ()
No symbol table info available.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

~$ dpkg -l | grep indicat | cut -c-70
ii indicator-applet 0.2.0-0ubuntu2
ii indicator-messages 0.2.6-0ubuntu1
ii libindicate-gtk1 0.2.3-0ubuntu1
ii libindicate-qt0 0.2.2-0ubuntu2
ii libindicate3 0.2.3-0ubuntu1

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 i ll have a look at http://live.gnome.org/Empathy/Debugging and post all logs soon

following http://live.gnome.org/Empathy/Debugging "old way", i have some logs that i attach below (after changing email address to '<email address hidden>')

empathy.log
gabble.log

if empathy depends on another package, it should be added in dependencies, and be sure that the needed applet is launched whatever the environment is (xfce, gnome, kde ....)

This is definately not related to the original bug, please file a new bug. Ideally let apport file it. Do you get a crash dialog when you try to start it?

The indicator isn't a dependency and isn't needed for empathy to work. This bug was specifically for handling the case where the indicator wasn't present. I understand you don't have the the indicator in your panel, someone has ported it to work with xfce but I don't think that has ever been packaged for ubuntu. This crash isn't related, perhaps there is a dependency missing or just something in you environment. Either way, it needs to be fixed but should be tracked in a separate bug.

Thanks

I've just had a very confusing time trying to get an Empathy icon visible in the notification area:

- I do *not* have an indicator applet running; I have a widescreen monitor and use vertical panels, and the indicator applet doesn't support these (and the authors do not appear to wish to support them; see #410254).

- I start Empathy. I have no contacts. I close the window. I get the minimise-to-panel animation, but nothing appears.

- ps shows that Empathy is still running, despite having no window and no icon.

Investigation shows that the icon only appears if I have at least one account. I assume there's a corner case here where if there are no accounts there is no status and therefore no icon. Either way it's not pretty having an application running that I can't interact with.

I believe this bug may not be as fixed as it looks...

Is that it?
2009 since the last comment on this issue?
I wasn't using Empathy in 2009. Did the problem get "fixed" then broke again?
Is there a new bug report for a new version of the same problem?

It's not just Empathy that struggles to get representation of it's running program. There are other apps as well.
Is there a root bug report? Why do apps worked for years have trouble when you involve the indicator applet? Feels like some development life cycle best practices have been completely ignored here.

It seems that some core concept of a "task bar" or a "system notification" area has been bastardized. All in the name of making things like that cute little blue notification envelop to work. It was cute for about 2 days, but after that it became completely obvious that my work style requires the ability to differentiate between an IM and an Email before deciding whether or not to divert from my current task to investigate. Therefore I need the EASY option to return to the original evolution green bubble for IM notifications separate from the integrated indicator applet.

Whatever happened to developing options for the users. From a UI design perspective it feels like the development path for this is a small group of people that do not appreciate the needs of other groups that would like to use the software. Try developing new cute features as optional without breaking existing features that may be relied on.

OK I'm only ranting on this thread because it seems like it's dead, but if anyone is still monitoring this I could use a pointer on how to get my green bubble back.

I am running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
I lost my green bubble after installing gnome-fallback-session because of a bug with the Unity Global menu that hasn't been fixed yet.
After launching into a classic-gnome-like session my green bubble is gone and empathy is once again not usable for me. I've tried various options with the check boxes mentioned above with no luck. I've even tried making the changes from dconf-editor which also has did not take affect
The strange thing is that if I launch tint... the original bubble does show up in that task area!!
such craziness!

Can anyone help me or should I think about going back to Windows?
<gasps>