XSF Discussion - 2011-06-29

another "i'll be lurking" day for me

's ok

bbiab

T-15

and hello @ all

hi Florian!

http://typewith.me/xsf

it seems that Jack, Florian, and bear are here

right

Will and Nyco missing

or at least in the room :)

but we have quorum

if you're all awake :)

i'm here (and awake!)

:)

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

so, should we start?

+1

ok ... so XMPP Validator

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

*for

to be developed

question is: do we want to do this

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

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

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

great :)

Kev: could the Council come up with a spec?

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

jack: yes, that is step one for sure

Florian: RFC6120?

definitely

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

lol

I think Jack means a requirements document for the software

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?

none of those answers are in any RFC

right

I think it should be a webservice

checking clients / servers at first?

ideally it would be delclarative

or at least mostly so

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.

sure, for the protocol

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

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

hmmm

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

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.

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

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

interesting idea

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.

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

stpeter: I like the idea

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

massive, too.

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

stpeter: A test plan, I think I mean.

ah

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

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

Yes.

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

Servers are easier to test.

(dialback testing could be interesting)

yeah

as well as certificates

Kev: other than dialback, yes

stpeter: Dialback too, no?

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

Test it offers SCRAM? :)

yay

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

even companies like Microsoft and IBM have s2s code

yeah

Indeed.

plus it's good to encourage more federation

indeed

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

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

phone call, attention reduced

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

not necessarily all tests, but the majority of them

+1 to easily writable

+1

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

ie, send this xml, response must match this XPath

that sounds interesting

and the schema obviously :)

I think that's one of many sensible approaches.

ok off the phone

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

right

it's all about the code

forget about all these specs :)

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

Or client vendors.

yeah

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

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

sounds good

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

next item?

yep

Bylaw enforcement

we talked about this last week ...

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

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

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.

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

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

right

heh

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

that happened long long ago with DJ Adams, too

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

it almost hapepned with Ian right?

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

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

is it fritzy?

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

Ralph

weird. he emailed me just the other day

oh sure

he's been voting on most Council items

just missed 3 XSF votes

what a dork!

yeah :)

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

i always vote early now

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

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

but it's not the end of the world

the Council would just continue on with its other members

I think :)

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

well, there is wiggle room in the bylaws

which is a separate problem, perhaps

maybe that needs to be tightened

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

heh

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

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

The Council must be Members thing is fairly unambigous.

Automatic termination seems pretty clear as well.

I thought so, Peter doesn't :)

peter: what's your argument?

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

may vs. shall

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

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

you may resign, you may be removed, etc.

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

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.

Although I note

"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."

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

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

hmm

i guess i agree with peter about the may thing

which means the board could vote ti keep/remove ralph

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

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

^means

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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".

I don't think the board is

it's the ED's choice I think.

yeah

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

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.

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

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

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

heh

ok

stpeter: right

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

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

phone again

he just can't vote

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

+1

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

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

I'll be on the phone for a while here

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

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

So he gets 2 weeks of not being on the council

Only 2 weeks?

well, i don't know when the election is

so i guessed :)

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).

ah, yes

so 3 months.

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

I would have thought so.

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

Kev: not quite :P

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

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

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

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

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

or next meeting

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.

ok

sorry, family distractions here...

ok

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

about fixing the bylaws?

(off the phone)

yeah

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

right

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 :(

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

and see when we can have another meeting

yes

cools

thx all :)

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

some of it is "obvious"

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

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

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

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

:P

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

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

cool

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

nice