Re: [Ekiga-devel-list] Reorganizing things

[yannick <sevmek free fr>]

Peter Robinson a écrit :
>> Sorry, it is a bad timefor me as my work is starting again; I'll have
>> fewer spare time for 2 or 3 weeks...
>>
>>> (Except Peter: thanks for the nice words and help offer!)
>>>
>>> Le lundi 31 août 2009 à 19:58 +0200, Damien Sandras a écrit :
>>>> Dear all,
>>>>
>>>> It appears clearly that since a few months I can dedicate less time than
>>>> before to Ekiga. During the first 5 to 6 years of the project, I was
>>>> dedicating all evenings to the project and nearly all week-ends, fully.
>>>>
>>>> It is now impossible for me to continue developing at that pace. If we
>>>> organize things in a clever way, I think it will not be a problem. My
>>>> intensive work probably hide a few organization problems.
>>>>
>>>> We now have a few very high quality contributors: they help the project
>>>> move forward will less "devotion" from myself.
>>>>
>>>> The purpose of this e-mail is to identify the areas where people can
>>>> help and how we should work. But before identifying those areas, I would
>>>> stress on the fact that my wish is to release often, but with only a
>>>> limited set of new features, that are well-tested. We have seen in the
>>>> past that we had worked on many new features, half-finished, and that it
>>>> was hard to stabilize them before doing a release. I don't want this to
>>>> happen.
>> I like this idea too, 3.0 was a pain to release. Beside, network (TCP
>> support) and the audio part of Ekiga (e.g. pulse audio) needs some new
>> features quickly.
> 
>>From a Fedora point of view the two "bugs" I see on a regular basis
> are "Audio Problems" (will be fixed mostly by a Pulse Audio plugin set
> as the default) and Network issues which are mostly Firewall and NAT
> based. I think support for upnp would possibly fix most of those
> issues for the average user. The would be the most useful features
> from my point of view and the later would probably also help the issue
> with ekiga.net "not working" mentioned elsewhere.
> 

I see pulse audio as a good thing for the Linux audio stack; it provide
a unified test case of the major features and my hope is to see it
improve the situation at the end. (and IMHO it really needs improvements...)

The network issue is also a complex matter. I agree upnp will improve
the situation too. Still it will not be enough for some people. The
software we compete with here (skype) is full of workarounds for
hardware/network config *hostile* to VoIP. As people with software which
do not work are always louder than people where it just work, the
situation will still harm ekiga reputation. Beside, the security topic
here is quite important and very complex, and this is something skype
deals with obscurity. Quite frankly, I doubt if the skype protocol was
open, it will be considered as secure... I've started to work on the
topic, i.e. how to deal with hardware/setup hostile to VoIP. I've hope
to publish a white paper in the coming months (I was full of hope to
publish this for the end of august, but I was then busy with user
support, bug triaging, packages, etc.). I do not see a good fix for that
in the short term. Any help is welcome.

> Peter
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