Replacing python-telepathy with telepathy-qt on Ubuntu-touch

So, this is a long story so I will try to keep it short.

• The phone-app running on ubuntu touch is a telepathy client.
• phone-app uses telepathy-qt to talk to telepathy.
• telepathy-ofono is a bridge between ofono and telepathy.

So far so good. The problem comes now:

• telepathy-ofono was initially developed in python and python-telepathy
• python-telepathy is deprecated in favor of pygobject

This means that we will eventually need to drop python-telepathy,
and this is why we are porting the current telepathy-ofono from python-telepathy
to telepathy-qt. Phone-app highly depends on telepathy-qt already, so this move
seems to be pretty reasonable.

But we have one more problem to solve: telepathy-qt does not provide full support
for connection managers, which is currently a big blocker.
Fortunately an initial (and working) support for telepathy connection managers was
added by Matthias Gehre. [1]
He implemented many telepathy service side interfaces and they seem to work fine.

Based on his implementation I’ve started to develop a new telepathy-ofono [2] a few weeks ago.
Using the same idea of the existing interfaces, I added support for some other interfaces
needed by phone-app, like the call channel interface (Channel.Type.Call1), call content (Call1.Content),
mute (Call.Interface.Mute) and hold (Channel.Interface.Hold). [3]

There are some other missing interfaces that I will be adding support in the next
few days, like DTMF (Call1.Content.Interface.DTMF).
I hope I can finish implementing everything soon so I can submit a merge proposal upstream later next
week.

Ok, looks like we are good telepathy wise, but we still need to talk to ofono. Fortunately there is a project called ofono-qt [4]
that helps doing this job.
Nothing is perfect and looks like it is a bit outdated. The ofono api changed a bit since the last
commit to the project, so I updated some methods and I also intend to propose a merge upstream soon. [5]

That’s it. The new telepathy-ofono based on telepathy-qt is on its way.

I will finish this post with a small TODO list so it’s easier to understand what’s still missing
and what will be done next.

telepathy-qt:
– Fix eventual crashes when clients close call channels
– Check why objects paths are still exposed on dbus even after the channel is closed
– Implement DTMF interface

telepathy-ofono:
– implement DTMF support
– implement custom voicemail properties
– implement online status support

 

[1] https://github.com/mgehre/telepathy-qt
[2] https://code.launchpad.net/~tiagosh/telepathy-ofono/tp-ofono2
[3] https://code.launchpad.net/~tiagosh/telepathy-qt/telepathy-qt-basecall
[4] http://gitorious.org/meego-cellular/ofono-qt
[5] https://code.launchpad.net/~tiagosh/+junk/ofono-qt

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