[MIR] ofono-qt

[Tiago Salem Herrmann]

[Availability]
 * Available in universe

[Rationale]
 * This package is required by telepathy-ofono

[Security]
 * No known security issues at this time.

[Quality assurance]
 * This package has unit tests, but not executed during build because they require ofono to be running.

[Dependencies]
 * This package depends only on qt5 which is already in main.

[Standards compliance]
 * This package uses qmake and requires no translation.

[Maintenance]
 * This package is maintained by Canonical and actively in use on the phone and tablet images

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Questions:
- Tests aren't being run, do we know why?

- This is apparently abandoned upstream. And we don't share the package with Debian. It doesn't seem to need much maintenance, but do we have resources paying attention to this? There are no open bugs in LP, which encourages but shocks me.

Non-blockers:
- It would be nice if the library had a symbols file.

[Tiago Salem Herrmann (tiagosh)]

Tests are not executed because they rely on ofonod running with some modem enabled, which is not doable on test environments.

Yes, it was abandoned upstream because ofono-qt was mostly replaced by libqofono.
This is the main reason why it has no bugs open.

There was some discussion to move telepathy-ofono to use libqofono (currently telepathy-ofono is the only package linking against it), but it would require a lot of effort and would risk introducing new bugs to the telephony stack, which is not an option at the moment.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

ofono-phonesim wouldn't work for tests?

Do we have a roadmap to switching to libqofono?

As a general rule, we don't like to officially support already-abandoned code with an existing replacement if we can help it. It would be nice to know that we do have a plan.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Especially since the rest of our stack apparently uses libqofono... See bug 1612702 that wants it in main for indicator-network, address-book-app and ubuntu-system-settings.

Why did we choose onofo-qt for telepathy-ofono? How much work would it be to switch to libqofono and standardize, so we don't have duplicate libraries in main?

[Tiago Salem Herrmann (tiagosh)]

- libqofono did not exist by the time telepathy-ofono was created, and ofono-qt was the only alternative. libqofono started as a fork of ofono-qt IIRC.

- The tests work with ofono-phonesim (actually phonesim is required).

- Some tests require manual interaction: http://paste.ubuntu.com/23085781/

- We don't have a roadmap AFAIK.

- It will be a lot of effort to move tp-ofono to link against libqofono. We have patches in ofono-qt that change some internal logic and add custom features that are probably not part of libqofono yet. Even the telepathy-ofono tests are based on ofono-qt. There is a mock to simulate a real modem using ofono-qt as base.

- If moving ofono-qt to main is really a blocker, as a short term solution I would say we could move ofono-qt into telepathy-ofono (since we already have part of the code there for tests), and than come up with a roadmap to finally move telepathy-ofono to link against libqofono.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Using ofono-phonesim and scripting the manual interactions (like starting a call, restarting ofono) all seems like perfect a candidate for autopkgtest (rather than a unit test, where you may not want to mess up your dev system).

The custom patches to ofono-qt are all the more reason to migrate to libqofono. We have other code that is using libqofono and may benefit from those patches, rather than just telephony-service.

Since telephony-ofono is the only rdepend of ofono-qt, moving it into the t-ofono and dropping ofono-qt from the archive is a reasonable way to avoid other packages depending on it once we 'bless' it.

But... that probably would make the security team's life a little harder if/when there's a security patch. They may not know we have an internal copy in t-ofono, but they would notice an archive package.

Normally yes, we block needlessly duplicated libraries going into main if we can. It's an update and security burden (and a source of bugs when apps don't work the same because they have different library behaviors).

I'd be fine with promoting this in main on a temporary basis, if you folks have a milestoned bug/plan to move everything over to libqofono. It will be good to stop investing custom patches into a dead-end library.

But no tests as well? Is there not even a subset of tests that don't require manual interaction that we can run, under phonesim as necessary? Not having automated tests seems like a disaster waiting to happen, and we have better standards in Touch than that.

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

We will no longer need this in main once the telephony-service silo land that removes depends on telepathy-ofono. That work is in silo https://requests.ci-train.ubuntu.com/#/ticket/1902 and we're fighting with build and test issues, hope to have it resolved in the next day or so.