XMPP Council - 2021-06-23

1) Roll Call

do we get a dwd?

or a Ge0rG?

or a daniel?

or a Zash?

I'm here

noone else?

Here

yay

that's quorum

2) Agenda Bashing

please just mention things during the meeting

3) Editor’s Update * Compliance Suites 2022 accepted as XEP-0459

Things!

4) Items for voting

I do not think there is anything

5) Pending Votes - Georg, Dave and Kim on https://github.com/xsf/xeps/pull/1064 - Dave on Deprecate and Obsolote Compliance Suites 2020

Zash, wanna cast?

Not at this time.

ok

6) Date of Next

A wild dwd appears

oh!

Argh. Sorry.

does the wild dwd want to cast votes?

+1 w wfm

+1w wfm

(I saw your vote on list)

Yeah. On list for the PR, which I note MattJ has updated now.

+1w wfm

And for Compliance Suites 2020, decprecate and obsolete it.

Uh, updating during the vote period..

yes I guess we technically need to revote, do we not?

Thought I appreciate the different spelling of "Obsolete" every time.

huh?

(fwiw, i am on mobilen, it is surprisingly tricky and workable at the same time, but I am also slower)

I would like it if that PR were discussed on list, I imagine that the other server developers might have an opinion, if only to agree.

it was posted to the list, but nobody cared

so I am not sure what can be improved there

+1w it is

5) Pending votes -- PR#1064 discussion

so, what do we do? I guess dwd will veto the old version because of his comments so we have to re-vote on the new version

question is if we first re-encourage list discussion?

Well if it has been posted to the list (sorry Matt) then there's little more we can do, but it makes me wonder if people care either way.

https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/standards/2021-June/038338.html

it has

I suspect the PR is fine now, I just don't know if discouraging the plaintext password field is going to annoy other server developers or if they don't care, or if they'd welcome the changes.

I said something in xsf@, tho minor

well I am sure that prosody will get an implementation and if nobody else cares, having MattJ take care of that seems sensible

the PR doesn’t sound very controversial

Yes, but what happens with ejabberd's implementation, for example?

namespace bump?

Would that makes things worse?

new xep? :-)

Even worse? :-)

https://uc.xmpp.zombofant.net/82d8419a-9c3b-4e8e-a12b-c8927a7cb56c/xMo_kGpIQgWp3Rq-w2PtBA.jpg

I dunno.

Hasn't the namespace changed a bunch of times already?

I think namespace bump is exactly the tool for that

I'm not against the PR, incidentally. i just have no feel for what the community feels as a whole.

we cannot force folks to give feedback though

we could poke some known server devs for sure

the general vibe i'm getting (not from the PR but from talks I had before that PR came to be) that those changes are welcome and long overdue

We can't force feedback, but it'd be nice to get some support for changing a Draft XEP.

daniel: vibe from whom?

on conversations.im for example we have talked about offering import/export to users (especially but not limited to our domain users)

but that has always been held back by 277 not being 'modern' enough

and that PR fixes exactly the problems we had with 227

I prefer an unopposed and unsupported change on a Draft XEP over yet another experimental rewrite XEP

daniel: those words would have been great on the list

jonas’, Yes, we don't want a rewrite.

But words of support from the ejabberd folks, and/or Openfire, would be great.

thats true

maybe we can poke Holger or so

we need to re-vote anyway

so I suggest we do that and poke folks on list in parallel?

I have poked Guus, for Openfire.

or do we want to poke first and vote thereafter, ignoring that there was lots of time already?

We can [re]vote next week regardless.

true

let us do that then

I think we can move on then

(I poked Holger)

7) AOB

has anyone got any?

I poked editor for a LC on vcard4. Just a heads up.

Sam: thx

(also for the reminder)

alright then

Also I request that council obsolete SOAP over XMPP at their earliest convenience.

8) Ite Meeting Est

thanks everyone

Sam, I'm not sure we should, it's still quite important with COVID.

dwd: I'm unsure if that was a joke or if all these aweful contact tracing sites are actually using SOAP :)

i was trying to look up a suitable badum tss gif

Thanks jonas’

afk now

It was a joke until you put that thought in my head...

It wouldn't suprise me either way :)

As someone else said when this came up recently, I'm very disapointed in that joke, go wash your mouth out with… some old protocol.

Anyways, jokes aside, please discuss at your earliest convenience. I would like it to not be on the list of XEPs if possible.

Hmmm.

It might actually be useful to have a state other than Deprecated or Obsolete for things like SOAP/XMPP. I mean, ifsomeone actually wanted to do SOAP over XMPP, it's a perfectly good way of doing it, but I agree we don't want it cluttering the list.

Maybe we need a new category for "technically this is still a fine way to do this, but don't do this"

oops, yes, that

Great minds think alike, whilst fools seldom differ, etc.

We could move it to Historical and turn that off by default (if it's on, I forget)

oh wait, that's a category not a state, or something

Historical unfortunate is a track and carries a bunch of other semantics.

I guess some of the historical ones like private XML are actually common and should be on the list too, so nevermind

Yes. "Historical" means "GRandfathered into our standards process from The Great Before"

WHat we want is an "Archived" status, or something.

Maybe just deprecated is fine. No longer in wide use because there are more modern protocols. They don't directly supersede SOAP over XMPP, but as SOAP is more or less superseded it seems like it more or less matches.

"New implementations not encouraged" being the important part

Although having an archive status also sounds good

As for 0227, ejabberd relies on its internal stanza ID format, so supporting MAM import would require adding another column. But I see no way around this.

Holger, On the list, please!

Also, not sure anything should be added to 0227 in order to support MIX roster entries? But maybe not. (Or maybe just a sentence mentioning the issue of MIX and/or generally unsupported childs ...)

Yeah, well, I had seen the posting, figured I have no noteworthy feedback, and now got poked to give it nevertheless :-)

dwd, Sam: Maybe it would be better to put more focus on the compliance suites, rather than getting rid of XEPs with obscure but valid use cases?

That is, also, a reasonable idea.

I do agree we need a better process / more focus on the compliance suites, but I still think having old things like this in the list just looks bad

I agree with Zash on that

Although I don't know how we'd add "Archive" at this point. Replace 0001? Can a new XEP modify the procedure w/o being the whole thing again?

we can update 1 without replacing

If I'm considering proposing those changes to 0001 anyways, would it make sense to also let you go straight from Final to Obsolete without the awkward "vote to deprecate first"? It makes the graphs easier to draw and it's not as if we don't already do that anyways

That's not true, the graphs are hard to draw either way (or I'm just bad at this). Maybe this isn't a good idea because this state machine is already too complicated.

I don't see a problem with the deprecate+obsolete vote, we can do it in one batch

Okay, quick PR submitted anyways to help start discussion.

Thanks, Sam!

I suppose one could argue that this could also just be a website change and doesn't require an XEP change

Ie. there's an archive section you can filter on but its full of final and historical XEPs or whatever state they were in

Just "stuff we don't think is really useful anymore"

You can set such a filter already, I think - but calling it out in a helpful way (possibly a preset) seems useful.

Having read the scrollback, I do wonder if Deprecated or Obsolete is actually what we want for something like SOAP over XMPP. One hopes that SOAP is obsolete at this point. I'm not sure we need a new Archived state (IMHO developers might not be clear on the difference between Archived and the states we have now).

But I can reply on the standards@ list if there's a thread (I don't see one at the moment).

> But words of support from the ejabberd folks, and/or Openfire, would be great I’m sure there are other servers too...

;-)

I tend to think Obsolete or Deprecate is fine too, but as long as *something* happens to it (and probably others, it just seemed like an uncontrovoersial one to start) I'm happy.

I agree that Archived might just be confusing.

Now, we do have this thing about moving from Final to Deprecated to Obsolete and perhaps folks don't like the two-step process, but that's how things are defined and it gives developers plenty of warning.

yay, back on a real keyboard

Sam, so my take on SOAP over XMPP is that even if SOAP is deprecated or whatever, that’s no reason to deprecate that on our side. It is still a valid (albeit probably niche) use case and you can still do it and it doesn’t cause harm to have it specified. Obsoleting or Deprecating it makes no sense to me.

Kev, are there other servers which (whose users) are interested in migrating individual users between services? If so, there is a thread on list which went completely silent from those servers ;)

Not individual users, no, but we do support 227 both in and out.

The harm is political, not technical. Everyone thinks XMPP is some dead outdated technology and having "SOAP over XMPP" on the main page you go to when you're trying to figure out what XMPP things to do doesn't help.

But I agree there's no harm in leaving it specified if we could hide it away in the "not actually useful anymore" page somehow.

Although we don’t do the user password bit any more.

Sam, if new users go to the full list of XEPs to figure out what to do, that’s really wrong and *that* is what we need to fix

Kev, on-list feedback is then surely appreciated

(even if it is just "lets do that")

I agree with that too but to a certain extent that's always what people are going to do so we might as well fix both problems.

I think obsoleting SOAP over XMPP is fine, personally. SOAP is obsolete.

May as well just clean up the list.

+1 to Kev