Bug#979139: /usr/bin/linphonec: Missing documentation: access to linphone-friends.db.

[ael]

Package: linphone-nogtk
Severity: normal
File: /usr/bin/linphonec

Dear Maintainer,

*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***

   * What led up to the situation?

I did an upgrade and lost a excellent working linphone installation :-(

I realise that this is probably an upstream problem, but removing an
excellent working linphone and replacing it with a barely documented
substitute which appears to only have 5% of the old functionality
without warning is really poor.

Removing the GUI completely is pretty dire. I am very comfortable with
the cli, but it is completely unclear how it is intended to be used.

To be a bit more specific:

1) Starting linphonec gives a series of error messages:

belle-sip-error-Cannot connect to [UDP://sipgate.co.uk:5060]
2021-01-03 13:10:21:607 belle-sip-error-belle_sip_get_src_addr_for: bctbx_connect() failed: Network is unreachable
[..snip 5 repeats ]

These do not seem to prevent outgoing calls, so perhaps as just
informative, although it is unclear what is happening.

2) There seems to be no acccess to ~/.linphone-friends.db

linphonec> friend list

gives no results. Checking ~./linphone-friends.db with
sqlite3 ~/.linphone-friends.db
shows that all the contacts are still there.

How is linphonec usable without access to the "directory".

3) How is linphonec supposed to answer calls? Yes there is an "answer"
command, but is a copy of linphonec supposed to be running
perhaps in a terminal to accept calls?

>From the linphonecsh man page and inspection with htop, it seems
that linphonec has an undocumented --pipe option, which presumably
is the answer to the question above. It is unclear how an incoming call
is  signalled.

I am sorry to be so negative, and perhaps need to do more reading, but
such a sudden downgrade without warning is upsetting.
Thank you for all the working in maintaining the package.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: bullseye/sid
  APT prefers testing-debug
  APT policy: (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 5.9.0-5-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)