[Sugar-devel] Thoughts on Collab

[Jerry Vonau]

> On July 23, 2016 at 5:36 PM sam at sam.today wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> In the irc meeting 2 nights ago, we discussed adding collaberation to 
> the journal project feature.  Abhijit has spent around 3 weeks working 
> on it.  But we can't even get a text channel between the participants.  
> Telepathy is painful, buggy (we have a segfault in salut) and hard to 
> debug.  It is also unmaintained - the last commit to telepathy salut 
> and gabble was 2 years ago.
> 
> So this is the pre-text for an experiment; modernising the 
> collaboration stack without using telepathy.
> 
> Initially, I proposed Matrix.Org.  I don't support this idea any more, 
> as matrix.org has some very messaging specific features, and some spots 
> where sugar would not fit idiomatically within the api.
> 
> So I have been thinking a little more about splitting up the problem 
> into 3 sections:
> 
> 1)  A neighbourhood view implementation - a model to discover people 
> nearby or via the school server
> 2)  A group messaging socket - the backbone for collaboration in 
> activities
> 3)  A one-to-one file transfer mechanism - used for initial state sync 
> in activities, "send to" feature in journal, etc
> 
> I have think that we can do the neighbourhood view by using 2 backends 
> and merging the result.  We can use the Avahi api to publish/find 
> activities/buddies on the local network.  We could additionally use a 
> school server (running a custom sugar server app) to support buddies 
> who are not on the same network.  Since both activities and buddies 
> have unique identifiers, we can easily have both back-ends running at 
> the same time, and de-duplicate the result.
> 
> Avahi is very fun to work with:
> 
>     avahi-publish-service "Sam P" "_org_sugarlabs_collab_user._tcp" 
> 8080 "name=Sam P" "color=#fff,#000" "other_metadata=other_value"
>     avahi-discover
> 
> All of the backends could give us an ip and a port to reach the other 
> person.  For the avahi backend, this would be a direct connection to 
> the other buddy.  For the schoolserver, it would be proxied through the 
> schoolserver.
> 

FWIW, I plan on dropping support for gabble within XSCE as the code base is
very old and I'm not fond of maintaining the fork, with OLPC's patch, of
ejabberd. The only reason I have not done so yet is that the package still
installs but nobody is testing the functionality. Should the server side
get updated and straitened out I would welcome keeping ejabberd in the XSCE
fold. Just don't look to have the XSCE project help with the development of
the updating, but testing of the updated server side we might help with as
I can't speak for everybody involved. Pull requests welcome.

Jerry      


> I'd love to hear your thoughts on the other problems, and on this 
> problem to.
> 
> Thanks,
> Sam
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