[Linphone-developers] Recent mediastreamer2 breaks Kopete, help needed

[Bernhard Schmidt]

Hi,

after years of carrying an obsolete version of Linphone (3.6.1) in
Debian a couple of maintainers have recently managed to package the
current versions of all involved libraries in Debian. They currently
live in the experimental branch.

If we manage to upload them to unstable soon we can release the next
Debian version (and, since Ubuntu takes linphone from Debian, also
Ubuntu) with an up-to-date linphone stack, possibly even with the new Qt
Linphone Desktop application.

There is one major blocker unfortunately. Kopete (the KDE instant
messenger application) uses mediastreamer2 for Jingle (I think). It
builds fine with the old library version, but fails to build with the
current mediastreamer2, presumably due to the Factory API changes in
2.13 (?). This prevents the whole stack from being uploaded.

The Debian bug with a buildlog is at
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=890606 . There is an
upstream bug report at https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368340 with
a patch that just passes NULL to the new fields.

https://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=101315

But according to https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/129325/ passing NULL
just crashes.

upstream is of course reluctant to take this on because there is no real
information how this API change is supposed to be followed by
applications. From the KDE bug:

> Problem is because external mediastreamer library changed its API.
> 
> I have not find any information about it yet, nor how to port old
> applications.
> 
> Proposed patch pass NULL pointer to some functions, but again I did
> not find anything about it, that this is really correct solution.
> 
> Passing NULL on "random" place without understood 'WHY?' is wrong
> solution.
> 
> I would suggest to report bug to mediastreamer project, that they
> broke API and existing application... And without providing any
> information what to do...

I could not find a lot of information about this either and I'm not
really an experienced C developer, so this is out of my league as well.

I'd appreciate if someone involved with mediastreamer2 could have a look
at this and get back to the KDE developers on how to use this API. If
there is a patch that probably works we could even try to get a build of
Kopete carrying this patch into experimental and test it against the new
libmediastreamer.

Thanks a  lot for your help

Bernhard