shtoom and dbus

[Anthony Baxter]

Hi there,

I'm the author of a Python VoIP client (and server) called shtoom. I've
recently been made aware of dbus, and I thought it'd be good to mention
here some of the plans I have for using it - see if people have comments
or suggestions.

All of this uses the twisted/dbus integration I've done - 
http://svn.twistedmatrix.com/cvs/sandbox/anthony/dbus/

1. Audio device detection

The first step is to use dbus+hal to detect the audio devices and allow 
users to select the audio device they wish to use. This is all pretty easy
and obvious (although obviously it only works for ALSA, but I'm caring
less and less about non-ALSA sound on linux).

2. DBus hooks in shtoom

The phone (and servers) get dbus hooks to allow things like "place a call
to this address". I still need to read up on the StarterBus, to see if this 
allows me to start shtoom if it's not running. The server side also gets 
these sorts of hooks - for instance, in the case of the conferencing server,
it'd be excellent to have a hook for "call this address and patch them in 
to this conference". 

3. DBus signals from shtoom

There's a few sorts of signals shtoom can/should generate. The first is 
some sort of audio mute signal - when an incoming call comes in, I want
to be able to mute a running mp3 player (or whatever) so that the user 
doesn't have to do so. Obviously, this will require a client to listen for 
these events and do the muting. This seems like something that would 
be generally useful.

4. Notifications

Are there any implementations of the notifications spec? Google
points to this URL:
http://www.galago.info/specs/notification/0.3/notification-spec-0.3.txt
but I can't see what the "officialness" of it is. Obviously, this is something 
I'd very much like to see, if only because it makes it much easier for me
to do "you have a new call". 

-- 
Anthony Baxter     <anthony at interlink.com.au>
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.