[GnomeMeeting-list] When Ekiga rings... and when maybe it shouldn't.

[Fabien Chevalier <fabchevalier free fr>]

Hi all,

I noticed a strange behaviour of Ekiga regarding the ringtone, when 
using SIP (it might be the same thing using h323, however i haven't 
tryed it).

Currently, Ekiga starts the ringtone as soon as the end user starts the 
call. This means that basically it starts to ring *before* anything is 
received at the remote end.
My little knowledge of SIP would tend to make me believe that Ekiga 
should start the ring tone when it receives "ringing" from the remote 
side, and not before. In fact i tryed another SIP softphone (SJPhone) to 
check if my assumption was correct... and it looks like SJPhone does 
work as described above.

Now, why is this Ekiga behaviour annoying ?
In fact using free.fr (one of the top alternative broadband operator in 
France) brand new PC-to-Phone SIP service, the call setup can take 
between 5 and 15 seconds. During this timeframe, the ringtone rings at 
my side, which means i will have heard a bunch of ringtones before the 
other side has started to ring ==> which means i really don't know if 
the call is so long because the guy at the other end is not there or 
because the call is still setting up itself.

For my point of view, it makes Ekiga hardly usable...too bad, is such an 
  oustanding piece of software otherwise !!

Is it a bug? Or maybe am i missing something ?
Would it make sense to change the current behaviour ?

Cheers,

Fabien