[reSIProcate] The Future of nICEr

[Adam Roach]

Resiprocate developers (cc: Resiprocate users, selected developers) --

I'm writing this on behalf of the WebRTC implementation team at Mozilla.

As many of you are probably aware, the Resip repository currently 
contains an ICE [1] library, called nICEr [2]. Several years ago, this 
library was pulled into Firefox as a component of our WebRTC 
implementation. Initial improvements and bug-fixes in nICEr were 
upstreamed from the Firefox repository into the Resiprocate repository 
on a periodic basis. The most recent such upstreaming was in April of 
2015. Since that time, the nICEr implementation in Firefox has had many 
additional improvements and fixes [3].

At the same time, we note that nICEr in the Resiprocate repo does not 
appear to build any longer on modern systems. As a consequence, 
upstreaming our changes would either require us to troubleshoot and fix 
the resiprocate/nICEr build system, or to blindly apply changes without 
the ability to test whether they work in the Resip codebase. We further 
conclude that the inability to build the version of nICEr in the Resip 
repo is a good indication that it is probably not being actively used or 
maintained in the Resiprocate project.

Based on the foregoing: we’d like to officially re-home nICEr into the 
Firefox repository. This would involve (a) adding a build target for 
nICEr as a standalone library in the Firefox repository, and (b) 
removing the files from the resip nICEr directory and replacing them 
with a pointer to the Firefox repository.

We would like feedback from the Resiprocate community on this proposed 
change before taking any actions towards such a move. If you have any 
input or information -- even if it is just "I don't use nICEr" -- that 
would be helpful. Please respond by Friday of next week (February 17) 
with comments, support, or objections; and use the resiprocate-devel 
list for this discussion.

Thanks!

/Adam Roach
Resiprocate Developer, 2002-2010
Mozilla Principal Engineer

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[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5245
[2] https://github.com/resiprocate/nICEr
[3] 
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?list_id=13429770&chfield=resolution&chfieldfrom=2015-04-01&chfieldvalue=fixed&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=ice&resolution=FIXED&chfieldto=Now&query_format=advanced&component=WebRTC%3A%20Networking&product=Core