KDE voice/video communication abstraction?

[George Kiagiadakis]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 10:35 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.
>
> 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.

As David said, Telepathy is already an abstraction layer, with
available backends for the most popular technologies out there,
including XMPP, SIP, Skype and GSM plus some limited support for
whatever libpurple supports (msn, icq, aim, yahoo, you name it...). Of
course Skype and GSM require some proprietary bits (software and
hardware, respectively), but if you are a company willing to invest on
this, I'm sure you can find what you want.

> 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?

>From what you describe, it sounds like you want to reimplement
Telepathy on top of Telepathy. Such an attempt has been made in the
past and it didn't end up anywhere (dig for tapioca and decibel if you
are interested). It simply doesn't work, and especially if you want to
abstract the call-related APIs, which are extremely generic in purpose
and difficult to deal with in a very generic way. The question is,
what do you want to achieve with this?

Best regards,
George