XSF Discussion - 2011-06-29


  1. bear sighs

  2. bear

    another "i'll be lurking" day for me

  3. stpeter

    's ok

  4. stpeter

    bbiab

  5. Florian

    T-15

  6. Florian

    and hello @ all

  7. stpeter

    hi Florian!

  8. Florian

    http://typewith.me/xsf

  9. stpeter

    it seems that Jack, Florian, and bear are here

  10. Florian

    right

  11. Florian

    Will and Nyco missing

  12. stpeter

    or at least in the room :)

  13. Florian

    but we have quorum

  14. stpeter

    if you're all awake :)

  15. jack

    i'm here (and awake!)

  16. Florian

    :)

  17. Florian

    Agenda over at: http://typewith.me/xsf

  18. Florian

    so, should we start?

  19. jack

    +1

  20. Florian

    ok ... so XMPP Validator

  21. Florian

    the idea here would be that the XSF would pay fo one

  22. Florian

    *for

  23. Florian

    to be developed

  24. Florian

    question is: do we want to do this

  25. stpeter

    it would be a good thing to have developed -- the question is if we can interest people in working on it, and whether we can build a sustainable project team

  26. Florian

    can we ask the Council for a list of things we'd want to have it test?

  27. jack

    i think it would get done for free if we just wrote a spec for what it was

  28. Florian

    great :)

  29. Florian

    Kev: could the Council come up with a spec?

  30. jack

    i'm not opposed to paying for its development, but i think the real issue is nailing down what it does and how

  31. stpeter

    jack: yes, that is step one for sure

  32. Kev

    Florian: RFC6120?

  33. Florian

    definitely

  34. stpeter laughs at Kev's comment

  35. Kev

    Your spec is ready: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6120.txt

  36. Florian

    lol

  37. stpeter

    I think Jack means a requirements document for the software

  38. jack

    are we testing clients? servers? components? all of the above? is it web based? are the tests written in javascript? is the harness an app anyone can run or a web service?

  39. jack

    none of those answers are in any RFC

  40. stpeter

    right

  41. Florian

    I think it should be a webservice

  42. Florian

    checking clients / servers at first?

  43. jack

    ideally it would be delclarative

  44. jack

    or at least mostly so

  45. Kev

    jack: Right - but Florian asked for a spec for it to test against, and surely the RFCs initially, followed by the XEPs are the canonical definition of what needs to be tested.

  46. stpeter

    sure, for the protocol

  47. stpeter

    it's been ages since I wrote any kind of requirements document...

  48. Kev

    Florian: A webservice is fine as long as it's a webservice one can run themselves, I think.

  49. Florian

    hmmm

  50. jack

    so the intention is to have it be runnable by arbitrary developers

  51. Kev

    I don't really care what form it takes, or what language it's in, or anything like that. He who puts the effort in can choose that stuff, just so long as people can grab it and run it.

  52. Kev

    jack: That was my assumption, but I grant that it is *my* assumption.

  53. stpeter

    Florian: as I said, I can probably raise some money to help with this effort, but we might use that to do something like hold a hackfest for the validator team at FOSDEM

  54. Florian

    interesting idea

  55. Kev

    If there's money in it, I'd have thought an interesting way of spending it might be to have someone produce the bullet-point form of 6120 conformance.

  56. stpeter

    e.g. we pay travel and hotel for project contributors

  57. Florian

    stpeter: I like the idea

  58. Kev

    That's not something I'd be willing to do on my own time, though, because it sounds massing.

  59. Kev

    massive, too.

  60. stpeter

    Kev, could you explain what you mean by bullet-point form?

  61. Kev

    stpeter: A test plan, I think I mean.

  62. stpeter

    ah

  63. Kev

    Writing the validator then becomes 'simply' codifying that, which is much less open-ended.

  64. stpeter

    http://xmpp.org/rfcs/rfc6120.html#conformance might be a start toward that

  65. Kev

    Yes.

  66. stpeter

    to Jack's point, I think it would be good to test either servers or clients to start with, whichever is simpler

  67. Kev

    Servers are easier to test.

  68. stpeter

    (dialback testing could be interesting)

  69. Florian

    yeah

  70. Florian

    as well as certificates

  71. stpeter

    Kev: other than dialback, yes

  72. Kev

    stpeter: Dialback too, no?

  73. stpeter

    oh yes we'd need to test everything eventually, the question is what do we build in to start

  74. Kev

    Test it offers SCRAM? :)

  75. stpeter

    yay

  76. stpeter

    another advantage to server testing is that presumably some server vendors could become interested in this project

  77. stpeter

    even companies like Microsoft and IBM have s2s code

  78. Florian

    yeah

  79. Kev

    Indeed.

  80. stpeter

    plus it's good to encourage more federation

  81. Florian

    indeed

  82. stpeter scrolls up to look at Jack's questions

  83. Florian

    so, who's willing to write up a project spec?

  84. stpeter

    I'm out of the loop on testing methodologies, but what does it mean to write the tests in javascript?

  85. stpeter

    phone call, attention reduced

  86. jack

    i didn't mean anything by naming javascript, but i am of hte opinion that hte tests should be easily writable by most people

  87. jack

    not necessarily all tests, but the majority of them

  88. stpeter

    +1 to easily writable

  89. Florian

    +1

  90. jack

    i think when fritzy and i discussed this in '09 we were talking about something like Expect

  91. jack

    ie, send this xml, response must match this XPath

  92. Florian

    that sounds interesting

  93. jack

    and the schema obviously :)

  94. Kev

    I think that's one of many sensible approaches.

  95. stpeter

    ok off the phone

  96. Kev

    I'd go with whichever one someone was willing to code :)

  97. stpeter

    right

  98. stpeter

    it's all about the code

  99. stpeter

    forget about all these specs :)

  100. Kev

    If it were easy to write tests in this framework, I *suspect* server vendors would start to chip in code themselves.

  101. Kev

    Or client vendors.

  102. Florian

    yeah

  103. Kev

    As they want to prove they're acting correctly and someone else isn't.

  104. stpeter

    Florian: I propose that we start to work on a short requirements page at the wiki

  105. Florian

    sounds good

  106. stpeter notices that he needs to retire http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Radar

  107. Florian

    ok, so Wiki page, and then we'll go from there

  108. Florian

    next item?

  109. stpeter

    yep

  110. Florian

    Bylaw enforcement

  111. Florian

    we talked about this last week ...

  112. Florian

    looks like we haven't been enforcing Bylaw 2.6? ...

  113. stpeter

    we'd need to ask Alex about that, but in general we have been as far as I know

  114. stpeter

    that is: Section 2.6 Automatic Termination. Members may have their membership status automatically terminated and their names removed by the Secretary of the Corporation from all membership records of the Corporation if they fail to participate in three (3) consecutive meetings of the Members of the Corporation, held electronically or otherwise.

  115. Florian

    ah... we should add a notification to the members and members list

  116. jack

    it definitely was enforced before. i got terminated in 05 or something

  117. Florian

    right

  118. stpeter

    heh

  119. stpeter

    the problem here is that one of our Council members missed 3 consecutive votes

  120. stpeter

    that happened long long ago with DJ Adams, too

  121. stpeter

    DJ resigned, but missing 3 membership votes was not the primary reason he resigned

  122. jack

    it almost hapepned with Ian right?

  123. stpeter

    the bylaws do say "may have their membership status automatically terminated" instead of "shall" or "must"

  124. stpeter

    jack: quite possibly -- I don't remember that episode as clearly

  125. jack

    is it fritzy?

  126. jack

    i imagine if it was mamiller, stpeter would go kick him

  127. stpeter

    Ralph

  128. jack

    weird. he emailed me just the other day

  129. stpeter

    oh sure

  130. stpeter

    he's been voting on most Council items

  131. stpeter

    just missed 3 XSF votes

  132. jack

    what a dork!

  133. stpeter

    yeah :)

  134. jack

    i seem to recall getting personal emails from alex if i hadn't voted by a few days before closing

  135. jack

    i always vote early now

  136. stpeter

    and since Council members need to be XSF members, if you're not an XSF member then you can't be a Council member

  137. jack

    well, is the issue that hte council will be hamstrung without him?

  138. stpeter

    but it's not the end of the world

  139. stpeter

    the Council would just continue on with its other members

  140. stpeter

    I think :)

  141. jack

    is the board even allowed to contradict the bylaws? :)

  142. stpeter

    well, there is wiggle room in the bylaws

  143. stpeter

    which is a separate problem, perhaps

  144. stpeter

    maybe that needs to be tightened

  145. jack

    perhaps we should terminate his XSF membership, admonish him a little, give him dispensation to serve on the council until his term is up, but contigent on him not missing any more votes

  146. stpeter

    heh

  147. Kev

    I don't think the wriggle room is for that.

  148. Kev

    I think the wriggle room is the ambiguity as to whether the ejection from membership is automatic.

  149. Kev

    The Council must be Members thing is fairly unambigous.

  150. jack

    Automatic termination seems pretty clear as well.

  151. Kev

    I thought so, Peter doesn't :)

  152. jack

    peter: what's your argument?

  153. Kev

    That it uses 'may' instead of 'will'.

  154. stpeter

    may vs. shall

  155. stpeter

    http://xmpp.org/about-xmpp/xsf/xsf-bylaws/

  156. stpeter

    if you look at the other subsections there, it's pretty clear that 'may' is used for stuff that's optional, whereas 'must' and 'shall' are used for things that are not optional

  157. stpeter

    you may resign, you may be removed, etc.

  158. jack

    ok. then the question is what would the board like to do here?

  159. stpeter

    for example, Section 8.1 says: If a Council member resigns his or her membership in the Corporation, is removed from membership in the Corporation, or is terminated from membership in the Corporation, he or she shall thereby relinquish all rights and responsibilities as a member of the Council.

  160. Kev

    Although I note

  161. Kev

    "Section 2.5 Removal by Members. A Member may be involuntarily removed from membership by an affirmative vote of two-thirds (2/3) of the Members of the Corporation."

  162. stpeter

    you may resign or be removed, but if you do then you shall relinquish all rights blah blah

  163. Kev

    So by the same logic, that would suggest that an affirmative vote of 2/3 members to eject someone isn't binding.

  164. Florian

    hmm

  165. jack

    i guess i agree with peter about the may thing

  166. stpeter loves parsing legalese

  167. jack

    which means the board could vote ti keep/remove ralph

  168. Kev

    "The membership has voted to eject you" 'Sorry, it says May and I don't want to' "Oh, ok then"

  169. stpeter

    I think 2.5 "the membership may choose to remove a member..."

  170. stpeter

    ^means

  171. stpeter

    I'll grant that I have not reviewed the entire bylaws in many years

  172. Kev

    There seem to be other cases that explicitly say "may, but need not" too.

  173. stpeter

    Jack, BTW we had a wideranging discussion in this room last week, see http://xmpp.org:5290/muc_log/muc.xmpp.org/xsf/110622/ for the archives -- it makes for interesting reading

  174. jack

    So we can choose to remove or keep Ralph, and I assume we're only having this conversation because most people want ot keep him on the council

  175. Kev

    So whatever happens, I think some amount of clarification might be good.

  176. stpeter

    Kev: I think we need either some clarification or a revolution

  177. jack

    clarification is easyish if you know what you want. what do we want?

  178. Kev

    jack: I think the question is "Do you get special dispensation for failing to comply because you've been generally helpful", although the question is also "Is Board in a position to give such dispensation".

  179. Florian

    I don't think the board is

  180. jack

    it's the ED's choice I think.

  181. Florian

    yeah

  182. jack

    the bylaws give the organization leeway to keep/remove him in this case, and the ED is authorized to make that call

  183. Kev

    I don't think his Councilness is relevant, Council will carry one way or the other, it's because it could be considered a mean thing to do to Ralph when he's done a great deal over the years.

  184. stpeter

    the clearest thing to do is to enforce the bylaws without exception

  185. Florian

    the thing that came out of the discussion last week, we should enforce them and avoid situations where people get special treatment

  186. jack

    really teh board should not get involved with the day to day details :)

  187. stpeter

    heh

  188. stpeter

    ok

  189. Florian

    stpeter: right

  190. jack

    ralph can still participate if he's not on the council

  191. stpeter

    I'll have a chat with Ralph, but it seems best for Ralph's membership to lapse for the next 2 weeks or so

  192. stpeter

    phone again

  193. jack

    he just can't vote

  194. jack

    i feel like there should be some repercussions for the not voting thing

  195. Florian

    +1

  196. jack

    do the bylaws have any l anguage about reinstatement if you've been terminated?

  197. jack

    if not, then i think we can do whatever we want assuming he reapplies and is voted in

  198. stpeter

    I'll be on the phone for a while here

  199. Kev

    jack: You're back in, and so's Bear.

  200. Kev

    So I'm assuming it's fine to reapply.

  201. jack

    So he gets 2 weeks of not being on the council

  202. Kev

    Only 2 weeks?

  203. jack

    well, i don't know when the election is

  204. jack

    so i guessed :)

  205. Kev

    Wouldn't it be until the next membership vote (3 months I guess, given you're having this discussion because of the just-past last election).

  206. jack

    ah, yes

  207. jack

    so 3 months.

  208. jack

    can the council survive with ralphm's input but not his vote for 3 months?

  209. Kev

    I would have thought so.

  210. Kev

    Council doesn't do any real work anyway, right? That's all done by people contributing on the lists.

  211. stpeter

    Kev: not quite :P

  212. jack

    From my own experience, lapsing was embarassing enough to be just punishment

  213. Kev

    Equally, given the circumstance, I'm sure that if Ralph had comments to make, Council will make sure to listen.

  214. jack

    and i don't htink i've ever missed a vote since

  215. jack

    so if I were ED, i suppose i'd terminate hiim and let him reapply. ralphm can learn not to miss three votes in a row

  216. jack

    and next week we can decide what to do about the bylaw modifications to give us more or less leeway on this issue.

  217. jack

    or next meeting

  218. jack

    I have got to run to lunch with the wife (we're at an hour already). I'll check the room when I get back and respond via email to anything else.

  219. stpeter

    ok

  220. stpeter

    sorry, family distractions here...

  221. Florian

    ok

  222. Florian

    I'm just wondering ... should we move this bylaw discussion to the mailinglist?

  223. stpeter

    about fixing the bylaws?

  224. stpeter

    (off the phone)

  225. Florian

    yeah

  226. stpeter

    sure, doesn't hurt -- although I'd prefer to discuss some of the bigger issues, too

  227. Florian

    right

  228. stpeter

    however, I really need to finish reviewing a whole stack of documents for my meeting tomorrow and I've made zero progress on that so far today :(

  229. Florian

    right ... so let's move this to the list

  230. Florian

    and see when we can have another meeting

  231. stpeter

    yes

  232. Florian

    cools

  233. Florian

    thx all :)

  234. bear

    stpeter - do we know for sure how much of google+ is xmpp related?

  235. bear

    some of it is "obvious"

  236. bear

    but i'm wondering how loudly we should be banging the drum about it being xmpp backed (or if we should at all)

  237. Tobias

    normal IM + group video chat...that all, right?

  238. bear

    yea, but it also feels like MUC, SIP, video, presence....

  239. Tobias

    don't know..haven't tested/analyzed it myself...just know what others wrote

  240. Tobias

    :P

  241. Tobias

    http://juberti.blogspot.com/2011/06/announcing-google-hangouts.html <-- at the bottom it doesn't mention SIP...but that doesn't mean it's not there

  242. Tobias

    Standards-based: XMPP, Jingle, RTP, ICE, STUN, SRTP Fully encrypted (HTTPS + SRTP)

  243. bear

    cool

  244. bear

    i'm beating the drum internally at moz about more xmpp support - so this really helps

  245. Tobias

    nice