[Bayonne-devel] GNU SIP Witch 0.1.0 released (finally), GNU uCommon release candidate also

[David Sugar]

I had been largely away the last few months, and I have also been at 
times off-grid, working with various American Indian groups, two of whom 
have now formally withdrawn, and others who are in the process of 
formally withdrawing, from treaty with the governments of the United 
States and Canada.  I had also been kept occupied full time with other 
projects.  However, rather than waiting any longer, I have decided this 
was a good time to introduce the very first release of GNU SIP Witch and 
the first "official release candidate" for GNU uCommmon/GNU Common C++ 2 
2.0, and see if we can return to releasing early and often.

GNU SIP Witch is intended to become a pure SIP based office telephone 
call server supporting generic phone system features like call 
forwarding, hunt groups and call distribution, call coverage and ring 
groups, holding and call transfer, as well as offering SIP specific 
capabilities such as presence and messaging.  GNU SIP Witch supports 
using secure telephone extensions, for placing and receiving b2b calls 
directly over the internet, and intercept/decrypt-free peer-to-peer 
audio and video extensions.

GNU SIP Witch is not a SIP proxy, a multi-protocol telephone server, or 
a IP-PBX, and does not try to address the same things like asterisk, 
freeswitch, yate, all of which make use of direct media processing. 
Instead, GNU SIP Witch focuses on doing one thing as a pure SIP call 
server, and will try to do that one thing very well.  My goal is to 
focus on achieving a network scalable telephone architecture that can be 
deeply embedded, which can support secure calling nodes, and that can 
integrate well with other SIP based/standards compliant components.

The initial release of GNU SIP Witch offers support of SIP registration, 
multi-target registration, authentication peering over SIP, and 
registration querying of user agents, basic call processing between 
registered user agents only, but including call distribution for 
multi-target registrations, and basic SIP instant messaging.

After some discussion, the GNU Project has decided that the uCommon 
package, and starting with 1.9.0, is also to be known a release 
candidate for what will be the merged GNU Common C++/uCommon which will 
effectivily become GNU uCommon 2.0.  The original GNU Common C++ 2 1.x 
codebase will continue to be maintained with bug fixes, but no new major 
features are planned.  uCommon has a cleaner model for IPV6 support and 
CIDR policy processing, which are critical to the project moving 
forward, as well as better ability to integrate with other third party 
libraries, and the ability to build very tight embedded profiles in C++.

GNU SIP Witch development has revealed some issues in the original GNU 
Bayonne2 SIP module including proper SIP ack handling, the need to 
support diversion headers for distinctive greetings on call forwarding 
to voice mail, and proper separation between request and to uri's. 
These will all be addressed in GNU Bayonne2 release 2.4.0.  There will 
also be a new release of GNU Bayonne classic (?1.4?) much later this 
year built around GNU uCommon and this will include a new SIP driver 
based on GNU SIP Witch & GNU Bayonne2 development.  This will be used to 
offer media application services to embedded GNU SIP Witch nodes.