Session daemons
Userland D-Bus IPC, KDE Telephony stack
ModemManager (or oFono previously) provides unified access to different modem devices with different command lists via system D-Bus IPC.
The tasks of the session side daemons are (but not limited to):
Handle calls and messages
Provide calls and messages history
Provide contacts PIM mapping
Power management
Notifications
Interacting with other parts of the user environment
Filter spam
Worth mentioning dependencies
eg25-manager
eg25-manager is a daemon to handle low-power modes of the Quectel EG25 via ModemManager. It's used for the Pinephone.
kop316 projects
Both projects are developed for Phosh but are environment-agnostic. They could be used directly via session-level D-Bus API to implement a Qt/QML library.
If not, at least the D-Bus scheme could be shared among both GNOME and KDE via Freedesktop project. And re-implemented in Qt after that if needed (for example, at modem-daemon repository described below). The described approach will provide interoperability on the GUI application level.
ModemManagerQt
ModemManagerQt is a Qt wrapper for ModemManager DBus API.
KDE Telephony Meta
kde-telephony-meta is KDE Telephony shared data:
D-Bus XML Interface descriptions
ready to reuse Qt meta types for complex D-Bus types as a header or a static library
Daemons
Modem Daemon
modem-daemon is a daemon for background tracking the modem events to:
Provide access to calls for client applications and daemons via D-Bus session level
Save the history
The daemon is written in Qt. It is similar to kop316 projects. It's working with the system D-Bus and provides session D-Bus API for applications. It's ModemManagerQt-first, but provides higher-level API so any possible manager switching should be transparent for the application level.
It's not KDE specific (just Qt) and could be used directly in projects like Nemo Mobile or even GNOME Phosh.
Work-in-Progress.
KDE Telephony Daemon
kde-telephony-daemon is a daemon for background tracking the modem events to:
Enable audio channels when needed
Show notifications
Automatically launch dialer GUI
Share KDE-related Telephony services via session DBus
It is KDE-specific and depends on Modem Daemon. It's not ModemManagerQt specific. Could also depend on such KF5 libraries as People, Notifications, I18n. Contains contactphonenumbermapper — a library to work with KDE KPeople and Google phonenumber libraries.
Work-in-Progress.
Relations with Telepathy IM
Telepathy IM is a FreeDesktop project supported by Nokia and Collabora. It's a framework to build instant messaging client applications with interoperability via D-Bus IPC. It could use oFono or ModemManager to implement calls and messaging clients. oFono integration is already implemented.
Telepathy IM could cover both telephony daemons in theory. The project is currently having the contributors' flaws. Telepathy project roots are from the good-old days of the Nokia N900/N9 Linux devices and Collabora team development. A lot of contributors are needed to support such a level of standardization. Right now we have Kaffeine maintainer who has “picked up the flag” and a few other project sympathizers. It’s the well-known chicken-or-the-egg problem that could be solved step-by-step though. The main weak point of the spec is probably service-side history.
So, the current dialer client implementation is going to be based on the ModemManager without higher-level TelepathyIM usage, while it still could be interesting to have an IM client solution with interoperability in the long-distant future.
Conclusion
Session daemons on the user-land level could be used to interact with other parts of the user environment and provide a unified API for GUI applications.
To provide actual developer libraries (environment- and language-specific) is out of the scope for any session-side telephony daemon. The D-Bus API exported via session bus enabling QML declarative plugin as library side to handle it.
Last updated