[Galene] Re: Fw: Re: Versioning the Galene protocol

[Jeroen van Veen <jvanveen@protonmail.com>]

> > Why support multiple versions of the same protocol? Wouldn't that only
>
> > complicate things at the Galene side? I don't mind personally to stick
> > to a version of the protocol, that was made to work with that particular
> > version of Galene.
>
> If the server cannot support multiple versions, then every change to the
> protocol breaks all non-web clients. (There's Galene-stream already, and
> I'd really like to see a native client for Android that can do screenshare.)

The web-version and protocol.js are always in-sync with the current version of Galene(same repo),
Galene-stream has its own protocol.py (https://github.com/erdnaxe/galene-stream/blob/main/galene_stream/galene.py),
and Pyrite uses a slightly modified protocol.js from the Galene repo. It seems useful to be able to keep the protocol
implementations in all used languages in sync, by making use of the included package managers (pip/npm/...)
for the versioning. A new version of Galene with an updated protocol would then mean updating the protocol implementations
in all languages and require the third-parties to update their dependencies. For instance:
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk

> Ideally, of course, we'd have a single protocol that is used across
> multiple servers. Unfortunately, the only standardised videoconferencing
> protocols are SIP and Jingle, both of which are somewhat strange (streamed
> XML, giggle).

I tried building a SIP conferencing client (https://github.com/garage44/ca11) with Asterisk SFU some years ago.
Asterisk itself is quite amazing, but I found SIP (over websockets) personally too complex to deal with signalling.
It may be nice to call in a conference with a Cisco phone, but who cares when everyone is using a softphone anyway.
A common signalling protocol for SFU's may be nice from a client perspective, and maybe even for interoperability
between SFU's. However, the more interoperability and standardization, the more it may start to look like SIP (or XMPP).