[Ekiga-list] Implementing ekiga-callto (plain number management)

[Alec Leamas <leamas alec gmail com>]

This is a discussion started in 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=576486. Making a try to move 
discussion  to the mailing list. Please read the bug to get context, 
specifically the "stories" attachment.

The basic idea is that users should be able to use ordinary phone 
numbers when using Ekiga.

> Snark skrev:
> There are several parts in all of this :
> - what can the user enter ?
User can enter anything which would be handled by a normal phone. User 
can also enter a number with formatting characters like in '+46 
(0)70-532 11 22', typically when pasting from documents. User can also 
enter a foreign number, meant to be evaluated outside user's country, 
but in this case user might have to edit the result before using it.

"User" could also mean other programs (e. g., Firefox) invoking ekiga 
through the CLI interface. This situation is more or less the same, 
besides that there will no be formatting characters in this case.

Another "user" is the address book, where users store numbers in all 
sorts of ways, often without countrycode similar to how numbers are 
entered interactive.
> - what can the user modify after entering ?
I don't really understand what you mean...
> - what does ekiga understand.
Well, in the end  Ekiga only understands a complete url on the form 
sip:+1234567899 sip provider net  My code makes the transformations from 
the forms mentioned above to this form.
> I'm not sure your code handles everything... isn't it only for '
> US-based phone numbers? Different countries have different schemes, 
> have a look there :
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_conventions_for_writing_telephone_numbers 
No, my code is designed to handle anything, and it seems like it does as 
well. My code can handle even odd things like local prefixes of more 
than one digit etc. There is a table in the very heart, a text file, 
which miss some entries for small islands/countries/territories  but 
should be complete otherwise. You can try the ekiga-callto package, it's 
python but uses the same logic. Or you can compile my package, it 
compiles to a test binary which makes CLI conversions, see the README file.

Alas, I'm not handling missing area codes. I don't think this is a real 
problem, though.

The URL you mention is a little bit off-topic.  The rewriting rules are 
more strict, the way people actually write their numbers is much more 
relaxed - and the list is far from complete.  Fortunately, it doesn't 
really matter. To get a feeling what the rewriting rules are, you might 
be interested in http://www.kropla.com/dialcode.htm.

> I'd rather have a discussion on the ekiga-devel mailing list, since 
> I'm not that familiar with what opal can handle : it would be better 
> if others could step in!
Now, we are here! But this is *not* about changing the interface to 
OPAL. It's about preprocessing numbers given by users to the form we 
already use. OPAL should not see any difference.

> Snark

--alec