KDE voice/video communication abstraction?

[David Edmundson]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 8:35 PM, Emmanuel Lepage
<emmanuel.lepage at savoirfairelinux.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am currently working full time on KDE related projects (see email references bellow) for the compagny I am working for. I am interested in providing a nice abstraction layer for voice/video communication for KDE, mostly for phone calls, but not limited. Mario Fux recommended me to ping this list, and I definitely want your feedback. As stated in the previous emails, there is some tiny bits of support for phone around KDE, but nothing consistent.
>
We actually had this email forwarded :), however thanks for getting in
touch directly.

> I think an abstraction layer with different backend like SFLPhone, Telepathy, native GSM chip or Skype would allow applications to better take advantage of available communication technologies. PIM applications are probably the ones with the most use cases, but if you think of KDE as a project more and more involved in the mobile space, communication become even more central part of the desktop.
>
> What do you think about such and abstraction? Are there design requirement you think are necessary to make a telepathy backend? Do you see more use case?
>
Telepathy is already an abstraction layer. A program, called a
ConnectionManager communicates between the protocol, and Telepathy has
backends for Jabble, libPurple, SIP and much more. In fact telepathy
even has a Skype backend, but it's owned by Nokia and is proprietary
with licensing complications.

Telepathy is used as a backend on some actual mobile phones, so
working on a computer between us and a softphone is plausible.

>From the sounds of it, what you want to do is best done as a
ConnectionManager.

http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/
http://gnomejournal.org/article/86/telepathy-overview
http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/spec/index.html

Right now ConnectionManagers can only be implemented in glib, however
Qt bindings for that are imminent (maybe already available). Perhaps
gkiagia can update the situation on this.

If this happens KDE Telepathy gets support automatically. As an
additional bonus you'd get support in Gnome for free. This is the
right place to do any abstraction.  Abstracting an abstraction layer
seems a bit silly :)

Dave
>
> Reference: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-hardware-devel/2012-June/001585.html
> Reference: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/active/2012-May/003773.html
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