Announcement Pidgin SIPE

[Niklas Andersson]

(Sorry if you get this a second time, posted the first reply with 
reply-address, not subscribed to pidgin-dev)

Thanks a lot Ethan, sounds promising

  As Youness pointed out, our patches are only an addition to the 
existing API, so it is backwards compatible.

  We hope that our contribution can increase the interest in Pidgin. I 
just visited the conference Voip2day in Madrid, Spain where it was 
pointed out that there is no Lync-client for Linux. Well, we are now 
bridging that gap, and everything is open source, and available for 
everyone. Let see if that gives Pidgin some new traction.

  The desktop screen sharing parts are not dependent on Lync in any way, 
so I hope to see it being used both in other clients, as well as in XMPP 
and SIP. On the conference I spoke with some SIP-guys that will kick our 
tires and see if the FreeRDP-libraries can be used in their software.

  Just waiting for the final approval, but we will step up our 
engagement with Pidgin, and help out with arbitrary bug-fixing to fix 
stability issues. Mainly related to proxy, when you switch between 
networks, but I hope we can contribute all over the line.

Thanks a lot!

Regards,
Niklas

On 2014-10-10 02:31, Ethan Blanton wrote:
> FYI, there's some real dicussion about this going on amongst
> developers, it just hasn't been on the list.  Several of us understand
> and acknowledge that this situation has been far from ideal, and we
> are working on way to get it fixed in a long-term fashion.  It is
> clear to me, at least, that there simply is not an active Pidgin
> developer with the time, energy, and/or expertise to handle VV issues
> at the moment.  We'll come up with something, stay tuned.
>
> Niklas Andersson spake unto us the following wisdom:
>>   Ericsson and Tieto are almost done with taking Lync to Linux, and
>> this month we will do the final integration of the FreeRDP-libraries
>> with Pidgin SIPE.
> This is great.
>
>>   After that everyone will be able to enjoy Lync on Linux with full
>> desktop screen sharing working both ways. I can only say that it
>> will be impressive.
>>
>>   Tieto and Ericsson is planning to do a public announcement about
>> this in November (tentative during Ubuntu Summit)
>>
>>   All our code is Open Sourced and sent upstream, but AFAIK the
>> patches sent to Pidgin is not yet incorporated in trunk.
> That is correct.
>
>>   It would of course be nice to say that all code is already in
>> upstream, but if we have to point to our own PPAs and github I guess
>> we have no other option.
> These are two somewhat different issues; accepting these patches
> upstream won't necessarily mean that they're in an upstream *release*
> for some time yet.  I don't recall if they require API changes or just
> additions; if they require only backward-compatible additions the
> delay would be much shorter.
>
> That said, we absolutely do need to get them integrated wherever they
> belong sooner rather than later.
>
>>   We are also onboarding more developers to help out with fixing
>> Pidgin-bugs, and I would very much prefer to do this in concert with
>> any Pidgin dev upstream, instead of maintaining a fork we are doing
>> right now.
> Understood and agreed.
>
> Ethan