[Sugar-devel] Thoughts on Collab

[Sam Parkinson]

I actually don't want to use XMPP for the new collab system.  I don't 
care how nice the library is.  Telepathy isn't the best, maybe pyxmpp2 
or nbxmpp are better.  But xmpp is not the right protocol for sugar.

Say you want to solve problem 2 and have a shared group channel.  You 
could use xmpp, but then every message you send has a huge xml wrapper 
around it adding metadata.  The metedata is useful for an IM 
application, but not very useful at all for Sugar.  So then maybe you 
use a stream tube over xmpp?  Well (at least for telepathy - but it is 
probably due to the xmpp protocol), you need to estabilish a group chat 
before you can call the stream.  Boom, added 200loc and another few 
round trips before the activity starts collaborating.

You also say that XMPP is standard, which is nice.  I like standards 
too.  But the way sugar uses xmpp, there is little point to it being 
standard.  "Standard" in Sugar content means you choose between 
ejabberd, jabberd and parsody.  You can't collaborate between Write 
activity and $other_word_processor.  You can't collaborate between 
Bibliography activity and $other_bibliography_manager.  Even if you 
could, that would be based on the "Bibliography Manager Collaboration 
Standard" - not XMPP.

Sugar has generic applications - not chat clients.   We need a generic 
application protocol - not an IM protocol.

Sebastian raised the point of backwards compatibility for his use case. 
 I think that we can provide a chat bridge no matter the technology.  
We could also just expose chat activity inside traditional dekstop 
environments, as your work continues to move towards.

Thanks,
Sam

On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 6:07 PM, Tony Anderson <tony_anderson at usa.net> 
wrote:
> XMPP is a standard protocol (originally called jabber). Currently,
> collaboration is supported on the schoolserver by ejabberd. This
> implementation has not been changed for years AFIK.
> 
> In any case, implementation of collaboration probably should be XMPP
> compliant to maintain maximum compatibility with what we are doing 
> now.
> 
> Tony
> 
> On 07/24/2016 08:04 AM, Sebastian Silva wrote:
> > Currently I can use gajim to chat to Sugar users (it will trigger a 
> Chat
> > activity invitation).
> >
> > This is the level I meant when I said "backward compatible".
> >
> > I don't know if python-nbxmpp or python-farstream support some sort 
> of
> > tube, but for sure the api won't be the same as telepathy. Those are
> > gajim's foundations.
> >
> >
> > El 24/07/16 a las 00:59, sam at sam.today escribió:
> >> How?  Who understands how the current code works?  Can we pass xmpp
> >> channels from gijam's xmpp library to telepathy?
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