Outdated Linphone packets

[Simon Morlat]

Hi Bernhard,

I'm following up on the topic of Linphone debian packages.
To introduce myself, I'm the original author of Linphone (started 18 
years ago...) and now co-leading the company centralizing the 
development around Linphone. I was in touch a long time ago with former 
Debian VoIP maintainers, but sadly this was lost as my activities were 
spread among too many aspects and platforms...

However I 'll be more than happy to see up to date packages of Linphone 
desktop app in Debian, and more than happy to help on this matter.

You are true when you say that we stopped releasing tarball packages, 
though I can assure you that development is still very active. The lack 
of tarball has been mainly the consequence of switching from 
automake/autoconf to cmake. Automake has recursive "make dist" that 
helps a lot in doing this task, but things are a bit more complicated 
with cmake.
As a result, we invite our users to checkout our git repos and use the 
tags and branches that indicate official releases. But I understand this 
not the way Debian works.

Recently, as the number of dependencies required for linphone growed a 
lot, we created a new meta-project called "linphone-sdk", which assemble 
with git submodules all our dependencies: bctoolbox, ortp, 
mediastreamer2, belr, belcard, but also some external dependencies: 
soci, xerces, opus, libvpx, mbedtls...)

This helps in doing standalone builds for iOS, Android, or other 
hardware devices with cross compilation. It also simplifies developer's 
life by avoiding to checkout multiple source code repository and 
iteratively build them manually. That's where we are now.

Based on that, we'd like also to provide something useful and simple to 
use for Debian maintainers, so here's my proposal:

We upload on our website:

- a linphone-sdk source tar.gz package containing all source code for 
libraries, with a cmake script that builds everything in one pass, but 
using debian included dependencies for our externals (soci, xerces, 
opus, libvpx, mbedtls...). Everything goes to a DESTDIR-like root-fs.
- a linphone-desktop tar.gz package contaning the new QT5 graphical user 
interface, that depends on libraries built by linphone-sdk.

Would this be helpful and sufficient for Debian developers to
- create debian packages for all linphone subprojects (bctoolbox, belr, 
ortp, mediastreamer2, belle-sip, belcard, liblinphone)
- create a debian package for the linphone-desktop QT application ?

 From a versionning standpoint and in order to keep things simple, all 
version numbers of linphone subprojects included in linphone-sdk would 
be aligned to be the same as the linphone-sdk tarball (similarly to what 
kde does with its components).
The linphone-desktop and linphone-sdk package would independant version 
numbers.

Let me know what you think about it, and please let me know if anything 
is unclear.

Best regards,

Simon


Le 7/24/19 à 17:14, Bernhard Schmidt a écrit :
> Am 24.07.19 um 17:02 schrieb Elisa Nectoux:
>
> Hi Elisa,
>
>> Thank you. I have just replied to the bug as you suggested!
>>
>> It would be really nice if we could help Debian’s team package the
>> latest version of Linphone. The app has been deeply improved since 3.X.
> As far as I can see, the Qt GUI (Linphone 4.x) is missing. We
> deliberately dropped it from the Buster release because it was shortly
> before the freeze and it didn't work well at that time.
>
> As far as I unterstand it is just a new GUI based on liblinphone and the
> whole stack, which, as far as I can tell, is up to date with the latest
> released version. Which brings me to the reason we haven't really
> updated a lot of Linphone lately, Belledonne does not seem to do
> releases of the linphone stack. Most of them have been released in 2017,
> liblinphone is still at 3.12.0  from July 2017, but I think there are
> literally thousands of commits on top of it in master. Same for almost
> all other projects in the stack.
>
> We even had to backport a few commits from git to fix compiler issues.
>
> We much rather package releases than some random git snapshots. We don't
> use it that much, so we don't have any insight about the stability of
> git master of a particular day. So please make a set of releases that
> work well together, which would help us to update the packages in Debian.
>
> Bernhard


-- 
Simon Morlat, manager and co-founder
Belledonne-Communications SARL
http://www.belledonne-communications.com
Phone  +33 952636505