KDE voice/video communication abstraction?

[George Goldberg]

On 15 June 2012 16:37, Emmanuel Lepage
<emmanuel.lepage at savoirfairelinux.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Right, Decibel, I remember that one now, havn't heard about it in a while, look quite dead. Still, the concept is really close to what I am interested in making possible in the long run. As of now, I think we can both agree, just like Nepomuk, contacts and communication are not integrated as well/deep as they could be in the desktop. When I think about telepathy potential, like coop-edit for some of my favorite KDE applications, I think of this http://xkcd.com/989/. I want to live in that world :P. The potential is so great. Just think sharing a document between a tablet/smartphone to a desktop/notebook in real time.

Decibel is dead and buried.

>
> But the challenge is, what is the best way to integrate those features into applications? This probably have been discussed over and over, but I am still asking. I don't think an hard dependency on telepathy for KDElibs would be well accepted right now. Conditional compilation for each application lack the central integration that make KDE so great. So, how to do it? How to implement KDE wide tools/API to make communication features integration trivial enough? Decibel is dead, but could the concept somehow live on?

I think its fair to say that KDE-Telepathy is the concept of Decibel
living on.  The problem with Decibel is that it ended up (ignoring the
earlier history as that's not really relevant here) being an
abstraction layer on top of an abstraction layer.  This was completely
redundant.  So Decibel died and KDE-Telepathy was born.  It's goal is
to provide a nice integration of real-time communication into KDE.  It
uses Telepathy as the abstraction layer to ensure that any
communication platform can be the actual backend to this nice
integration, be that IM protocols, Skype, GSM, or anything else.  The
reason for choosing Telepathy is it is already widely used (Gnome,
various smartphones, etc) meaning that most of the protocol
implementation is already done.

In version 5 of kdelibs, KDE-Telepathy will be one of the included
frameworks.  So any application that uses real-time communication
features will depend on it.

>
> About the ConnectionManagers, looking at http://cgit.freedesktop.org/telepathy/ and the previous comment, I wonder, is there an high level way to integrate complex protocols, if possible in Qt? I don't really want to maintain yet another complete implementation and the glib/networking team are busy implementing lower level features and protocols. Integration is up to me. We are open to invest / help you on some protocols and features as long as SFLPhone daemon remain a separated entity. This could probably take some weight off your shoulder so you can concentrate of all those awesome telepathy use case I hear every year. I can not make firm commitment on anything possible at this point, but the door -is- open.

I'm not really clear what you mean by "high level protocols".
Communication protocols are implemented as Connection Managers in the
Telepathy framework so that they can plug in to the abstraction layer
it provides, meaning that client/ui/integration code in e.g.
KDE-Telepathy can make use of them.

Having looked at the SFLPhone feature list on your web site, it seems
to me that integrating with KDE would consist of two parts - providing
a connection manager that interfaces with the SFLphone daemon to
provide support to Telepathy for all sflphone's protocols, and working
on KDE-Telepathy to help the project acheive its aims of having
real-time communication nicely integrated into KDE applications.

--
George