[GnomeMeeting-devel-list] Things I feel are important for gm's future

[PUYDT Julien <julien puydt laposte net>]

Hi,

the following thoughts were prompted by a mail my wife received
recently, were someone was looking for opensource solutions, and asked
around if anybody knew about this.

(Notice: the order isn't by importance nor difficulty)

(1 The infamous qc driver

I had modified the V4L plugin some time ago, to get a new V4L1 plugin,
that worked with the qc driver: it's the only driver that doesn't
support double-buffering out-of-the-box, and forces the users to run an
arcane qc-set command to avoid crashes.

A first idea would be to make the V4L plugin able to detect that case,
and handle it. However, looking at that plugin's code, I must say I'm
not really eager to add yet another workaround to a piece of code that
is already a terrible patchwork of various workarounds.

In fact, I'm wondering whether it wouldn't be better to write a new "QC"
plugin, that would handle just that driver, with no workaround for
anything else, and modify V4L to just fail to open a device that only
provides a single buffer.

It would give the following benefits:
i) stop the flow of people that have segfaults and/or bad video with gm,
and only because they didn't run the qc-set command that forces that
driver to double-buffer mode;
ii) provide an easy-to-debug plugin;
iii) not clutter furthermore a V4L plugin that I already find much too
complex;
On the other hand:
i) this makes yet-another plugin;
ii) it is code duplication;

1)
(2 IM 'integration'

We all know the difference between VoIP and IM, but we also know one way
to make gm more mainstream would be to make more people know its
existence, for example by making it easier to launch.

The current situation is that to use gm, you need to launch gm. It would
be nice if some IM programs (and as many as possible) were proposing a
voice(/video) connection through gm, and gave a nice "You really should
install gnomemeeting to enjoy that feature" popup if it isn't found.

2)
(3 win32 port

I don't remember exactly what the problem is for gnomemeeting on win32,
but I think trying to get it to work on that platform would also help a
lot to get it in more wide use.

3)
(4 mosx port

Same problem as the previous point; except that I discussed the issue a
little with Damien recently, and it seems the only issue for gm on mosx
is: there's no video input plugin!

I really think that is a really easy to fix problem, and it would not be
that difficult to find someone to help us out on this!

4)
(5 whiteboard

That is another thing that is asked. This doesn't really belong to
gnomemeeting, but being able to cooperate with such an application would
be nice; the way I see it, people get in touch via IM, then decide to
talk (gm), then find a little drawing would help, and need the
whiteboard.

The problem is: I don't know of any such app. I think there was an
opent120 project, but I don't think it is really alive...

5)
(6 "add a contact" api

This would involve writing a function that would be responsible of the
edit contact popup. This would of course be used in the ils/contacts
window, but would also allow to finally use the regex-enhanced text chat
code I wrote (and Migras rectified, checked-in and debugged -- see the
Changelog around the 19/12 of last year).

6)
(7 application sharing

I don't even really know what it really is, but it seems people want
it... I think it doesn't belong to gnomemeeting, but to another app, and
gnomemeeting should only cooperate with that app.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any project of that type...

7)

Feel free to comment, volunteer or object to anything I listed, or add
your own...

Snark