I sent an email on the debian-devel mailing list about the way Debian chooses which softphone to distribute:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/01/msg00434.html
For a long time, I feel that distributions have not given this a lot of thought, they just install whatever is part of the desktop environment, even if it is not fully functional. This is one reason people don't have a lot of confidence in free softphones and I feel it also undermines confidence in free software in general.
It would be really helpful if people could give their feedback on this issue in Debian and if you use another Linux distribution, start a similar discussion on their mailing list and send a link to it here.
Regards,
Daniel
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Hi Daniel,
I think that is a really good idea. It is possible to include a functional softphone though. E.g. the team behind sflphone (now ring) have recently added p2p functionality to their softphone. It supports SIP for more traditional hub topologies also. It could be configured as part of the Debian install process.
Another client we could make pretty much make work out of the box is tox https://tox.chat/
Kind Regards, John
On 13/01/16 10:43, Daniel Pocock wrote:
I sent an email on the debian-devel mailing list about the way Debian chooses which softphone to distribute:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/01/msg00434.html
For a long time, I feel that distributions have not given this a lot of thought, they just install whatever is part of the desktop environment, even if it is not fully functional. This is one reason people don't have a lot of confidence in free softphones and I feel it also undermines confidence in free software in general.
It would be really helpful if people could give their feedback on this issue in Debian and if you use another Linux distribution, start a similar discussion on their mailing list and send a link to it here.
Regards,
Daniel _______________________________________________ Free-RTC mailing list Free-RTC@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/free-rtc
On 13/01/16 12:11, johnc wrote:
Hi Daniel,
I think that is a really good idea. It is possible to include a functional softphone though. E.g. the team behind sflphone (now ring) have recently added p2p functionality to their softphone. It supports SIP for more traditional hub topologies also. It could be configured as part of the Debian install process.
Another client we could make pretty much make work out of the box is tox https://tox.chat/
One alternative way to get both of those included is for each of them to create a Telepathy Connection Manager (CM). Then their protocol will be accessible from Empathy and other standard softphones pre-installed by Linux distributions.
Connection managers don't conflict with any other protocols/packages or clutter up the desktop, so it should be possible for those to be installed by default in a Linux distribution.
I already sent this idea to Ring.cx for their bug tracker, could you make a feature request in the tox.chat bug tracker? Including the links below may help them evaluate the effort required.
The TelepathyQt library provides a C++ API to develop a CM. http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/doc/telepathy-qt/
The telepathy-resiprocate project provides a practical example of a CM: https://www.resiprocate.org/Telepathy_Connection_Manager https://github.com/resiprocate/resiprocate/tree/master/apps/telepathy
On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 11:11:13AM +0000, johnc wrote:
Another client we could make pretty much make work out of the box is tox https://tox.chat/
Last time I looked at tox, they would not commit to a stable protocol and just recommended to "use latest git / app". Has this changed?
On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 11:43:14AM +0100, Daniel Pocock wrote:
I sent an email on the debian-devel mailing list about the way Debian chooses which softphone to distribute:
This is not abotu including. This is about including in the default install.
And the basic issue is that GNOME doesn't provide one, and Debian's default is mostly GNOME's one.
How about fixing the issue at the desktop level?
On 13/01/16 12:49, Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 11:43:14AM +0100, Daniel Pocock wrote:
I sent an email on the debian-devel mailing list about the way Debian chooses which softphone to distribute:
This is not abotu including. This is about including in the default install.
And the basic issue is that GNOME doesn't provide one, and Debian's default is mostly GNOME's one.
How about fixing the issue at the desktop level?
GNOME does provide a softphone: Empathy. It is installed automatically with the GNOME desktop on Debian.
Despite the GNOME release-team discussion, I don't think GNOME have made any final decision to stop providing Empathy, there was more discussion on another GNOME list from October:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-list/2015-October/msg00004.html