Re: [GnomeMeeting-devel-list] SIP and GnomeMeeting - please comment

[Christian Strauf <strauf uni-muenster de>]

Hi Damien!

> After 1.0 is released, I plan to add SIP support to GnomeMeeting
> (provided that the libs I rely on are ready for that).
Can you specify the libs you'll use? I'm curious which libs you have in mind.

> * preferences common to both H.323 and SIP (Personal Data, Audio
> Devices, Video Devices, Audio codecs, Video codecs, ILS). 
> * H.323-only preferences (Gatekeeper, Fast Start Tunneling)
> * SIP-only preferences (SIP Proxy = same notion as a gatekeeper iirc)
IMHO this is not something that would drive users insane -- this will have
about the same complexity as any webbrowser that supports both HTTP and FTP --
and users seem to be able to distinguish between the two. I wouldn't worry
about the fact that GM will support more than one protocol. In my eyes, this
will make GM more attractive for the users.

> Usability people would tell it is bad because normal users don't have to
> know what is SIP and H.323. But well, I plan to add those preferences in
> an Advanced category, so that only experienced users play with those
> settings.
Same arguement as above: having H.323 _and_ SIP is not of a higher complexity
than having HTTP and FTP in a browser environment.

> he has to choose a protocol for calling him. If we choose SIP as default
> protocol in GnomeMeeting v2.0, the user will use sip:// URL's by default
> and we will have to tell him that if he wants to call old gnomemeeting's
> or Netmeeting's, then he has to use an h323:// URL instead of a sip://
> URL.
> 
> What do you think of that? Too complex?
Not at all. In regards to Kilian's mail, I would like to comment that in my
opinion, "callto://" is not a URI according to an existing standard and as far
as I know it doesn't serve any real purpose in GM except for pointing out that
a call is made to a certain location, meaning, one could easy leave "callto://"
out of the current version, right? (This is no criticism, I'm just observing
and asking if you agree on this.) So, introducing "h323://" and "sip://" would
actually give this URI a meaning (though this would be no real standard, but
that is no problem).

> If we keep ILS we can automate that by looking at the sappid:
> - Netmeeting or old GnomeMeeting user => h323
> - GnomeMeeting user => sip
To be honest, in your place I would throw ILS away and use LDAP instead. If you
use LDAP, you might be able to add a field which lists all available protocols.
This would be a direct approach. Of course, this would kind of leave out
Netmeeting... But even if you kept ILS-support, I would not "guess" the
protocol by looking at the sappid. You can't be sure that there will always be
a mapping sappid<->protocol that is relyable. But that's just my personal
opinion.

> Another problem is that if user Alain registers to the same gatekeeper
> than user Damien, doing 
> sip://Alain will not work
> h323://Alain will work
> Because the Gatekeeper is an H.323 thing, not an SIP thing. But we can
> suppose that only advanced users are using H.323 Gatekeepers or SIP
> proxies, and that they know what it is.
Well, I suppose if you would extend the error-message to "Could not contact
Alain via SIP. You must be connected to a SIP-proxy to do this. Otherwise, use
sip://Alain hostname " this would be sufficient to clear things up.

> The manual will become complex.
It would become longer but not more complex in regards to how complicated it
will be.

> Another direction that GM will take, is that we won't rely on GNOME
> libraries for things we can do without them. Minimizing the dependancies
> will be our main goal.
This is a very good idea. I count myself among the users that don't use gnome
and have gnomelibs installed for the sole reason to be able to run GM. So to
me, this sounds like a very charming idea. 

Christian

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