[sugar] [IAEP] Jabber Server

[Robert McQueen]

Morgan Collett wrote:
> [cc: sugar]
> 
> On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 03:32, Robert McQueen
> <robert.mcqueen at collabora.co.uk> wrote:
>> with this JID" option where you can type it in (or if you want to be
>> fancy, use your laptop's camera to capture a 2D barcode of the other
>> user's JID off their laptop screen?). Worth asking Sugar folks about?
> 
> Ivan mentioned this concept some time ago, and there is code available
> for it: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-February/011033.html

This has been a bit of an open issue with Sugar's UI since Dan Williams
visited Collabora in the UK in 2006 - we actually played around with 2D
barcode stuff then too because it was big hole in our plans. It was
kinda "cool, we can sort that out later because there's no UI for it at
the moment anyway, lets just jerry rig the server in the meantime".
Oops. Maybe that later should be now. :)

The problem: If the server doesn't make assumptions about who should be
allowed to see who (shared roster crap), and you're not willing/able to
expose information about yourself/your activities via Gadget (want to
talk to people on a different server, or non XO users), how do we
actually let people subscribe see each other?

This is a blocker for linking XS servers together (for either
scalability or for collaboration between institutions), and more
generally allowing safe use of non XS servers and talking to non XO
users from Sugar, which I think are all desirable goals.

The very least we could do is tweak presence service to use the user's
nickname to make a JID which is human readable, expose it in the UI
somewhere, and then do what normal XMPP clients do, ie let people type
in JIDs to add as friends, and have a "do you want to be friends with
$foo?" popup/question.

We can do better with 2D barcodes or such, but do we actually want to if
it harms our interoperability? Or do we offer both, so if you have two
XOs life is better, but if you want to talk to bob at gmail.com you can
type it in? Eben? :)

> Regards
> Morgan

Regards,
Rob

-- 
Robert McQueen                                 +44 7876 562 564
Director, Collabora Ltd.             http://www.collabora.co.uk