How to participate in GNU Telephony development
by David Sugar
Sometimes people ask how they can participate in the development of GNU
Telephony packages, such as sipwitch and antisipate. We have worked on
making it very easy for people to get started in participating directly
on our code. One of the special things we have done is create a git repo
that checks out and builds all our packages together in a single source
tree. This can be accessed from anonymous git:
git clone git://dev.gnutelephony.org/project/sources.git
cd sources
./bootstrap.pl
./config.sh
make
This does an anonymous checkout and then sets up and builds an entire
project tree of all our packages through a single top level make. I used
to do this with svn externals. Of course cmake means I can also use
ctest, and we will eventually create a continuous build server in the
future to make use of this. This is part of why we choose to maintain
our own dev server for this project. As we use gitolite, people who
actively participate in GNU Telephony can also be added for git write
access. Otherwise, git makes it very easy for someone to produce a patch
that can be submitted by email.
The README.DEPENDENCIES covers what system dependencies need to be
installed for Debian. I also documented the dependencies we require for
building on Fedora. Other GNU/Linux distros should be as easy to use to
develop from also. Finally, we also have “git clone
git://dev.gnutelephony.org/project/automake.git”, which has a
bootstrap.pl that does an automake build tree for those packages we
currently support automake for.
10 years, 7 months
sipwitch 1.8.1
by David Sugar
There has been a lot of great progress on making sipwitch fully exosip2
v4 context aware. We have added context to call sessions now, and have
call invites operating context aware. I am hoping only a few more
iterative releases will be needed to complete this, all within 1.8.x,
followed by some heavy testing.
10 years, 7 months
Antisipate and sipwitch progress update
by David Sugar
I have reached the point where Antisipate, our new secure VoIP client,
is able to successfully maintain registration with a sip service, as
well as handle the various registration failure cases. This is an
important breaking off point, as it enables us to develop functional
client services (calling, messaging, chat, media, screen sharing, etc)
on top of it now.
I will be using our GNU libzrtpcpp library to support end-to-end secure
media services. As we work in the free (as in freedom) world, we are
able to work from other similarly free software implementations,
including the excellent sfl phone, and the old code base from Twinkle,
as reference models for connecting rtp to audio for the media sessions.
I am also going to introduce otr for in-dialog sip chat messaging during
active call sessions. Given the questions currently around standardized
algorithms, I am also looking to see if we can make it easier for
individuals and organizations to plug-in alternative ones of their choosing.
Similarly, there has been a lot of progress in sipwitch. In particular,
I have started introducing the new eXosip2 4.x feature set, which
includes maintaining multiple protocol contexts. The work of integrating
contexts will be slow and happen over multiple releases before sipwitch
2.0 is ready, but at this point the sipwitch registration cycle is now
context aware. This much was completed for a new interim sipwitch
release, 1.8.0, this morning.
We do not cooperate with, nor receive funds or grants from any U.S.
government agency, any U.S. allied governments, or U.S. government
related institutions, as it seems so many of those who operate in the
commercial closed source proprietary world seem so eager to. To do so I
think, especially given present circumstances, would compromise our
ability to provide privacy enhancing secure communication solutions. We
believe privacy is a fundamental right and necessary for basic human
dignity, as outlined in the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (UDHR) article 12, among other places and documents, that
the present U.S. government now so thoroughly repudiates for all mankind.
10 years, 7 months