It doesn't appear to be obvious to me how to add a contact in empathy. There used to be a *menu*, but that was evidently too confusing for users and had to be removed?
The help that we ship with it suggests that to add someone to my list of contacts I should: 1. Choose Chat ▸ Add Contact. But I don't see *where* this 'Chat' menu is... I can right-click on an existing contact and attempt to chat with them, but that doesn't seem to get me any closer.
Isn't it still available from the Gnome Shell context menu -> Chat -> Add Contacts?
Er, which menu? Where?
the gnome shell application context menu, next to the Activities menu in the upper left hand corner of the screen.
Aha. I have found it. When you mouse over an application and its window becomes focused, its icon and name appear in the gnome shell bar at the top of the screen. That is the "context menu" of which you speak. You need to quickly move the mouse from the 'contact list' window to the top of the screen without allowing any other window to become focused (which might be easier with a mouse than my trackpad), and then you can find 'Contacts... Add Contact' (or 'Search for Contacts' which seems not to with with haze/sipe) in there. This could perhaps do with being documented more clearly. Or fixed, since the whole context menu thing seems to make more sense for full-screen applications (for those whose screens are small enough that full-screen makes any sense at all), and certainly doesn't work nicely for a small window like empathy's. Could we at least have an option to put the menu back *in* the application? I'm not aware of any other apps where the shell context menu has options that *aren't* available through normal, user-discoverable, means.
From mailing list discussion upstream and https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=695377 (especially #c2) I believe that this is an Empathy bug. It shouldn't have fundamental menu options like this appearing *only* in the silly GNOME "menu elsewhere" that you had to explain to me. They should *also* appear actually *in* the application's window itself. For the general case, the following command makes the application's menu actually appear in the application — so Empathy's 'Add Contact' feature ends up back in the app window where it belongs. But it would be useful if users didn't have to do this, just to restore basic functionality: gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings overrides \ "{ 'Gtk/ShellShowsAppMenu': < 0 > }"
This message is a notice that Fedora 19 is now at end of life. Fedora has stopped maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora 19. It is Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no longer maintained. Approximately 4 (four) weeks from now this bug will be closed as EOL if it remains open with a Fedora 'version' of '19'. Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' to a later Fedora version. Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we were not able to fix it before Fedora 19 is end of life. If you would still like to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version of Fedora, you are encouraged change the 'version' to a later Fedora version prior this bug is closed as described in the policy above. Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's lifetime, sometimes those efforts are overtaken by events. Often a more recent Fedora release includes newer upstream software that fixes bugs or makes them obsolete.
Fedora 19 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2015-01-06. Fedora 19 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. If you are unable to reopen this bug, please file a new report against the current release. If you experience problems, please add a comment to this bug. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.