XMPP Council - 2017-09-27

It's about time

1) Roll call

daniel, SamWhited, ping

Here

Link Mauve is excused, Dave just missing

Hi

great

2) Minute taker

jcbrand, are you available?

Yes I'm available

perfect

jcbrand: Thanks! It's nice having an editor that can take minutes on occasion again :)

I'm happy to help, just keep on pinging me please :)

3) Vote on "XEP-0060: Add pubsub#multi-items in Publish-Subscribe features #500" https://github.com/xsf/xeps/pull/500

I'll vote on list

On list

On list

4) Advancing "XEP-0286: Mobile Considerations for LTE Networks"

do we want to have the editors issue a last call?

Ooops, sorry I'm late.

i'd be in favour

I'd be in favour of advancing XEP-0286.

I am obviously biased, but I think we should issue a LC and at worst I'll get feedback from it even if it doesn't advance :)

SamWhited, I'm biased too.

*highfive*

daniel, any opinion on this?

No. I don't. Let's issue a last call and see what comes up

thanks

5) Discuss renaming "Draft" to "Stable" and make a recommendation to the board

The recommendation can be a PR to XEP-0001, incidentally. I'd note it'll mean regenerating all the XEPs, too.

All XEPs are regenerated twice a day or something now, so regenerating XEPs shouldn't be a problem.

Stable/Stablish sounds quite similar to Final

(Just in case it wasn't clear, I was joking about "Stablish")

Tobias, In fairness, Draft *is* quite similar to Final.

For me anyways that's the idea. When I mention that I work on XMPP to people, the first thing I always get at meetups and the like is "Oh, we tried that, but every feature we wanted to use was just a draft"

So making them sound similar might help.

My problem with us discussing it is by the time we've got to Council we (should) understand what these things mean, and are no longer in the mindset of those who would benefit from a change in name.

I'm not sure what this change will actually accomplish. I have never personally had the experience SamWhited describes where someone didn't implement it because it was just a draft

But if that's a real thing than I don't have any issues with this change

yeah...i'm not going to block this change, but other things might help more with this

I think Board might have a better chance of having a valid opinion than we do.

It's just a cosmetic thing anyway. It doesn't change any real problems we might have like not advancing xeps quickly enough and so on

Agreed; it is no substitute for fixing our process.

I think before doing something disruptive like this, there should be some real investigation into who it'll help, and who it'll hurt.

maybe add a standardized table to each XEP of known implementations or such, if people see it's implemented X times, it might be more attractive even though it's calle Draft/Experimental

That sounds like a lot of work to keep up. Have we ever been known to keep client lists, wiki pages, etc. up to date?

SamWhited, IIRC there were community fplk asking on how they could help, not?

(I still think the best marketing idea I've had for XMPP is to say it has a React-like wire format instead of saying XML)

Tobias: Yes, but communities ask how they can help and then dissapear after two weeks and it becomes neglected again.

also there are different issues at play here: a) having XEPs early accepted so they can be easily referenced and discussed, b) having quite stable XEPs (MUC) idle around in draft state for 10 years, c) name doesn't sound attractive

To me "Oh, we didn't use XMPP because the specs are Draft" doesn't sound particularly convincing. It might actually be true that someone read just one word in a XEP, and none of the others, but it seems a stretch.

I’d like to throw in that Link Mauve has proposed an XML format to describe XMPP software, including XEP support

we also already have the requirement for software we list on the website to renew yearly

Reactive Messaging and Presence Protocol?

we can step by step increase the requirements

and require them to list XEPs they implement

that’d give us the nice table Tobias wants (and which I think would be amazing to have)

jonasw, yeah but that's a different issue i think? ✏

I'm opposed to opening up XEPs for marketing purposes, FWIW.

Yah, let's discuss one at a time unless someone has a reason these issues are related and need to be discussed together?

SamWhited, +1

anyway let's not drift away from the topic. so regarding the recommendation on changing draft to stable I suggest "we don't have one. let the list discussion play out for a little while longer. and/or let board investige real world benefits of changing the name"

indeed, it’s not related to the name change. but Tobias brought that table up, so I wanted to bring the thing back into mind. nevermind me.

daniel, +1 for continuing the list discussion

That sounds sensible to me; let's let the board discuss and see if they can think of a way to investigate further

jonasw, yeah...could be integrated dynamically on XEPs, like you open a XEP and can expand a table that'll show existing implementations, but yeah...something for another time

This is a marketing question, and so Council probably isn't the right place anyway (although their opinion should certainly be noted).

naming XEP states is a marketing question?

6) Date of next

Tobias, XEP-0001 is a Board XEP, so it's not Council.

The reason for the rename is based on the premise that XMPP is hard to market because of the name of one state, yes.

dwd, ahh..alright

well..same time next week?

I don't think anyone is going to claim that a XEP would be easier to implement with the name of the state changed.

WFM

7) AOB

I’d like to throw in that there are still pending list votes from last week :-)

We have two outstanding things on our Trello board, ODR/OMEMO and XEP-0280. I don't know the status of either, but should we discuss them?

(regarding the LC proposals and the two ProtoXEPs)

odr/omemo can be removed

that's a list thing

not a council thing

There are a bunch of old probosed agenda items in Trello, which I think are all stale or at least in an unknown state. It would be great to have them updated.

jonasw, I'm no objection on colors and jet, FWIW. I'll do the rest on list (and these two if you don't get to them)

alright

thanks everybody

then I’ll see that colors and jet get accepted soon-ish.

thanks, dwd & all

I think 0280 was in LC and got delayed/deferred because of the rule complexity

And because of issues with <no-copy/> vs. <private/> that never quite got sorted out.

Ge0rG: the <transient/> annotation did have consensus thought, didn't it?

One marker to rule them all

*hint

daniel: I don't think so.

Mhh. it's hard to keep up when the discussion happens in three different channels

My agenda was to create a set of rules that work for IM, but underway I realized that I'm not competent enough to enumerate all affected user stories and XEPs.

daniel, indeed

in the past it was just ML + chat room, now it's ML + chat room + PR

I'm in the process of refining the problem statement, as discussed in xsf@ MUC today, in the hope to provide food for a Summit discussion.

My preferred venue would be my private blog, making #4 on the list of things to follow.

Tobias, I’m working on avoiding PR

jonasw, ta

i.e. directing technical discussions to the mailing list

the muc still doesn't have history, does it?

Because if I write long posts to standards@, they are either ignored or individual points are picked out and get discussed at length :>

daniel, not yet

I'm not sure how often I've brought up Carbons on the ML so far.

and there is stuff on the wiki

iteam wants dockerization but not keys in prosody docker...maybe dwd's Metre can help there

finding the right place to discuss how to route messages is even more complicated than to acutally route messages

daniel: sad but true

Tobias: Isn't that what environment variables are for?

SamWhited, ?

I'm open for proposals, though.

SamWhited, passing keys through envvars?

Tobias: For not putting secrets directly in a config file (a Dockerfile in this case)

IIUC other iteams didn't want the prosody docker to have access to the LE private key at all, might have misunderstood them though

Yes, they can have access to the key.

Not sure how Prosody's going to work over TLS without it.

i wonder if discourse has support for patch files. if so we could run on discourse only and get rid of github and mailman

Tobias, No. Well, sort of but we shouldn't, we should be using something like an SHCM.

Just that the key should live outside the container, and be linked in via a mounted volume.

daniel: and of XMPP.

dwd, SHCM?

daniel: I've never been able to convince discourse to work well as a mailing list. I'm sure it's nicer to maintain or nicer if you use it as forums via the web UI, but unless you know a secret I don't it's terrible for mailing lists as far as I can tell.

Every few months I try to sign up for the Rust lists again (they're on discourse) and it's always a rough experience.

SamWhited, oh i don't have personal experience with it. all i can say is that mailman doesn't work at all

yah, mailman is pretty terrible.

because it splits threads into month and doesn't provide a search

maybe mailman2 is a compromise?

I heard it has a flashy web interface

daniel: you can search your offline copy ;)

yes i can. but then i cant link to it ✏

daniel: but you can open the web view of the respective month and manually find the message there :P

I can't remember what it's called, but someone told me that Fastmail has a hosted mailing lists product recently. I would probably be willing to just pay for that and donate it to the XSF.

that's my workflow. search offline; and then find the mail online

I agree with daniel that that workflow is annoying

daniel: that's my workflow as well.

(I have no idea if it's any good or not, but their email is great so I assume their other products are too)

but my discourse experience (also with rust) as mailing list is wrose.

My experience with discourse is that it's pretty good as long as you dedicate a good portion of every day to it, but any less than that and it's a non-starter.

(Through the web interface)

the workflow is annoying, but at least you can search the ML archive locally when offline, and you don't need to interact with a horribly bloated Web 2.0 application.

Kev, that was my feeling too when rust moved to discourse

it is just another web forum, really

IIRC somebody proposed to provide IMAP read-only access with search to our MLs.

It seems fine if you want forums, but not if you want mailing lists.

agreed

https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/mailman-users@mailman3.org/ this doesn't look that bad

personally i could live with not having mail access. if that's the main issue. but i understand that people like their mutt or what ever

I need the push of email

I don’t want to poll a website every day

or every few hours

Alternative: Google Groups works well as a mailing list and is free.

And has a web UI.

Or Yahoo or whatever, I don't know the difference.

"well"

i see. i personally prefer pull for these things. i don't like it interupting what ever else i'm working on

LTIC I couldn’t post to a google group because google doesn’t like the network my mailserver is in.

even though the prosody group worked fine back then

https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/mailman-users@mailman3.org/thread/YWYSIBYMNRZC5KLJHNKJEYPIXKXYNEXA/ also lloks much nicer, but they decided for unreadable URLs apparently

so maybe it’s an option

mailman3 looks like a social network to me. But at least it allows permalinking to individual items.

Ge0rG, perma but not readable

Tobias, you can only have one, I think ;-)

maybe we can bring back google wave

Tobias: apparently what you are linking to is not mm3 but HyperKitty, "a Django-based application providing a web interface to access GNU Mailman v3 archives, and interact with the lists"

i feel like that was just ahead of it's time

Ge0rG, it is the more or less official mailman3 web interfae

I think it was just a marketing problem… it tried to do every damn thing and I never could figure out what the point of it was.

jonasw, you can put both unique and human reable data in URLs

daniel: I think it was created right at the end of Google's "don't be evil" and "support decentralized services" era and thus was killed quickly.

It was vaguely kind of cool, but I never could figure out a workflow or how I was supposed to use it.

> Drafts XEP on Spam prevention:

*lists only deferred XEPs*

https://blog.process-one.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Fighting-XMPP-messaging-spam-thanks-to-ejabberd-API.pdf

This is why "Draft" status is confusing.