[Sugar-devel] Jabber Questions.

[Morgan Collett]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 05:03,  <simon at mungewell.org> wrote:
> I kind of understand that Jabber is used as the 'reflector' for the
> collaboration stuff, but have a couple of questions.
>
> From a normal PC I can register a (new) name with 'conference.xochat.org'
> and see the XO's on it, albeit long hash like names until I get details.

Yup, their Jabber IDs (JIDs) are based on a hash of their public keys,
since this is assumed to be the only immutable name property. It's not
very friendly for interoperability with other jabber clients, but
Empathy and Pidgin do load the actual nicks (eventually, depending on
the server load).

> I can also create a room, but apparently this is not visible to XO's.

Shared activities are rooms, but have additional properties not
visible in a conventional jabber client - like the colors for
instance.

If an XO shares an activity, you will see that as a room - but only
Chat instances are usable because that is the only activity that uses
the "text channel" at the moment. So if you join a room created by
Chat, you can chat with the XOs.

In future, the plan is for Sugar to provide "overlay chat" for all
shared activities, so that you can chat with participants in any
shared activity. You would then be able to chat in any room using a
jabber client and have it show up in Sugar.

> The page http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Jabber mentions 'Send the following
> IQ'... what does that mean? (Using Pidgin if that's of consequence)

XMPP uses XML stanzas over the text channel to mean things. Typing in
the XML manually seems to send stuff that the XOs will understand.

> [Note: this only allows a single IP (not port), does this prevent multiple
> users behind the same router or on same machine?]

That ip4-address is part of the "buddy properties" but isn't needed
for collaboration over the XMPP server. It's actually used for link
local collaboration, where it does need to be your real (not NATed) IP
address. So it's not relevant in the server case but is needed to
populate the appropriate record in Sugar.

There have been threats for a long time to remove the IP4 addresses -
I think the original plan was to run everything over IP6, but that
hasn't happened yet, so there's no danger of removing the IP4
addresses yet.

> Is there some magic I can send to get a 'chat' to appear available for XO
> to join?

Using Pidgin, double click on an XO (you might need to look at their
info to find the nick if it doesn't show in the buddy list). Then type
something. The XO will display an invitation to Chat, in notification
area briefly, and in the frame (long term). Accepting that launches
Chat to chat to your Pidgin instance. That's a private chat, not a
chat room, so others can't join.

Regards
Morgan