On 26/04/21 12:03 am, Ingo Bauersachs wrote:
[...]
>
> I'm a committer in Jitsi and lurking around here. The idea to get
> Jitsi Meet into Debian is IMO very ambitious. I'm wondering how you
> intend to keep the packages up-to-date once they entered a stable
> release? WebRTC is such a fast moving technology and having a year
> old Videobridge is likely going to be broken/not working anymore.
I am only vaguely aware of the issue with Jitsi Meet doing catch up with
WebRTC standard due to something I read earlier. I hope Jitsi
Videobridge does not suffer the same issue. Or do Meet and Videobridge
have strong version dependencies?
One idea is to maintain the fast moving packages in Debian
fasttrack[1][2]. Once the packages have stabilized enough (over the
months/years) they can move into unstable/testing/stable. In FreedomBox,
we have made the decision to make selected packages from fasttrack
available to our end users (this will be backed by user interface to set
user expectations, daily automatic software updates, scheduled snapshots
and backups).
>
> Also, some packages already in Debian (and some in Jitsi) are old and
> would need updating.
I will request/assist the maintainers for newer version of these packages.
> For others, packaging the version used currently
> in Jitsi is somewhat questionable: the used version of Smack for
> example is a fork, upstream is at 4.4, but unfortunately, they don't
> follow SemVer and updating is a major pain. The same often goes with
> BouncyCastle.
In this case, it may become appropriate to maintain multiple versions of
the package: smack-4.4, smack-4.5, etc. In general, this is undesirable
due to increased bug fixing and security effort. We should try to avoid
it especially if no other packages depend on the library.
> I'm currently working on building packages for Jitsi
> Desktop again, but I'm not considering submitting them to Debian,
> there are just too many floating dependencies.
It would certainly be nice to have it in Debian. Please see if it is at
least suitable for fasttrack.
>
> I really don't want to discourage you but hoping to make you aware of
> the potential (and upcoming) issues.
I understand. I appreciate the information you have provided as it would
avoid surprises later.
Having a robust, mature and feature rich video conferencing in
FreedomBox is critical. It has been voted the number one priority in
this year's roadmap. I have several months of time set aside to work on
Jitsi and I feel prepared to take on the challenge :)
> I'm not sure if you're active in
> Jitsi's discussions forums (I'm not), but in any case, Damencho or I
> would certainly help you need patches applied upstream, you can ping
> me in issues/PRs with @ibauersachs.
I just subscribed to the Developers category in the forums. I will
publish packaging updates there as well.
Thank you for the offer, I will be sure you ping you in my merge requests.
>
> FYI, the package jain-sip-ri-oss-only is just Jain SIP/jsip [1], but
> without the non open-source files (src/javax/*). The Maven packing is
> in the Jitsi fork at [2]. The removed files are in the Debian package
> libsdp-api-java and libsip-api-java (as a clean-room
> reimplementation). java-sdp-nist-bridge is used to reconnect the
> deleted sources and libsdp-api-java. Jain-sip, without the
> repackaging, was the original reason why Jitsi Desktop never made it
> into Debian (i.e. past the FTP masters) and subsequent efforts were
> then dropped.
I see. Good to know. I will package these bits accordingly.
Links:
1) https://fasttrack.debian.net/
2) https://wiki.debian.org/FastTrack
Thanks,
--
Sunil