XMPP Council - 2023-11-02

Board is due to discuss this PR today, about adding an 'Archived' status for XEPs: https://github.com/xsf/xeps/pull/1070/files

While it is technically up to Board to accept or reject this, it's a feature that would ultimately be used (or not) by Council. So I'm curious what members of Council feel about it.

> A XEP of any type is in the Archived state if the XMPP Council has determined that the protocol defined therein is still the correct way to implement a protocol if needed but that the protocol or an underlying technology is out of date or not likely to receive updates.

The only example so far of a XEP that might qualify for this is "SOAP over XMPP"

*that I've seen

So for example the 3G xep ?

The mobile considerations one?

Uh probably yes

Potentially, though I still think a bunch of that applies to current tech too

I vaguely recall reading that it didn't but certainly warrants some more research

If you have sources for that, I'm very interested

Anyway to the question at hand, sounds good to me :)

why does Final not cut it?

It seems to overlap somewhat with "obsolete", but on reading the description of "obsolete" I guess I understand why adding a different status was chosen

"A XEP of any type is in the Archived state if the XMPP Council has determined that the protocol defined therein is still the correct way to implement a protocol if needed but that the protocol or an underlying technology is out of date or not likely to receive updates."

Er, copy/paste fail

> A XEP of any type is changed from Deprecated to Obsolete if the XMPP Council has determined that the protocol defined therein should no longer be implemented or deployed.

What about obsoleting all statuses?

right, obsolete doesn't cut it, but what about Final?

That wouldn't help with "too many XEPs" :)

ie "this is still the way to do SOAP over XMPP, but we doubt anyone is still doing SOAP" ✏

Final seems to communicate that well to me

Just count XEPs referenced by Compliance Suite as recommended and refd by DOAPs as relevant

> A Standards Track XEP is in the Final state after it has been in the Stable state for at least six (6) months, has been implemented in at least two separate codebases, and has been voted forward on the standards track by the XMPP Council.

I'm fairly certain SOAP is still out there in the wild (but I won't go looking for it), is it up to us to decide when external technology is obsolete?

Final does seem a decent fit

No.

Yes.

I think it's useful to be able to see the final XEPs that might be relevant today vs all of them

OTR is another one, yes it exists, yes it's still used, but it probably shouldn't be for new things

That's 'Obsolete' then

That's the only difference between 'Archived' and 'Obsolete' as written - Obsolete recommends against implementation

Hmm small distinction, I'm not sure if it's worth it

I'm inclined to say that the very value of having it for 1-2 XEPs is not worth unnecessarily increasing the number of XEP statuses, something we should rather be seeking to simplify

In particular because final already contains the "unlikely to be updated" part in the rules on how Final xeps may be changed ("virtually impossible unless you can convince everyone it is a clarification")

Yep, I think the "we're done with it" signal is the same in both cases

and Final allows us to skip the debate over whether the technology is actually obsolete or not, which is irrelevant to whether we want to continue working with it

What if something is, uh, done, but not eligible for final?

Defer? :)

There is always obsolete/deprecated

For example https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0365.html

Like that's probably the right way to do it, but the likelihood it changes or more implementations comes along seems unlikely