XSF Discussion - 2017-03-14


  1. nyco

    efrit: a Slashdot "debate" is taking place around this, and the failure of XMPP

  2. Zash

    Slashdot still exists?

  3. Ge0rG

    And it's full of dumb trolls. Nothing changed in the last 15 years

  4. ralphm

    I Soviet Russia, trolls dumb you.

  5. ralphm

    In Soviet Russia, trolls dumb you.

  6. uc

    Ge0rG: or paid trolls? I will not be surprised if it's some company's PR marketing

  7. Zash

    Fake news regarding our demise?

  8. uc

    Aand someone linked to this https://m.imgur.com/nfivrKQ?r

  9. jonasw

    as I said, someone needs to create a client which comes bundled with an XMPP server and hand-picked and automatically set up transports.

  10. Zash

    Do it, then talk about it.

  11. jonasw

    Zash: it’s on my todo actually. at least IRC, because I have usecases for that myself. Prosody would be the bundled server ;-)

  12. rion

    I believe libtransport is designed almost for this.

  13. jonasw

    is that spectrum?

  14. rion

    yep

  15. Zash

    uc: that was the original purpose of jabber, back in the day, to unite all different chat systems using bridges

  16. jonasw

    my experience with spectrum is unfortunately rather bad

  17. Ge0rG

    uc: I really can't imagine a company being dumb enough to pay for /. propaganda.

  18. Ge0rG

    uc: OTOH, marketing is usually led by a huge amount of heroine, so who knows.

  19. Ge0rG

    doesn't spectrum also bundle libpurple?

  20. Ge0rG

    I still have nightmares about exposing an internet service that's linked against libpurple.

  21. jonasw

    it depends on it, yes.

  22. uc

    Ge0rG: but are trying reinvent the wheel lol

  23. jonasw

    I think the multiline makes your client QUIT :with a nice message issue was also due to libpurple. Or maybe that was libcommuni and libpurple just had the /quit on the first line to quit your client with a nice message

  24. jonasw

    issue.

  25. Zash

    Does it still depend on gtk & co?

  26. jonasw

    but no point in bashing projects which at least try to do something better. especially if I haven’t taken the time to look into that multi-line thing

  27. Guus

    So, psa is stepping down. Now what?

  28. Kev

    Board choose a new ED. That's about it :)

  29. Ge0rG

    what's the job of the ED?

  30. Guus

    (what he asked)

  31. dwd

    "Get stuff done". More or less.

  32. dwd

    Bylaws, section 6.6 has the details, but the ED's job is to ensure that the Board's resolutions are carried out, and signs any contracts.

  33. Ge0rG

    so, what's the consensus of yesterday's "how much do we trust a remote MUC" debate?

  34. Ge0rG just had a really weird moment. Sitting in a regional train, I see an ad on the built-in display... "no ads... good battery use... the app for whistleblowers". Turned out to be a review of OWS' Signal by some smartphone news portal.

  35. Ge0rG

    At least I hope so. The alternative would be moxie haunting me.

  36. SamWhited

    According to some rapid grepping; Peter is an author of 59% of all XEPs. Perhapse we should consider minting the position fo "Executive Director Emeritus"

  37. Guus

    +1

  38. jonasw

    yeah, I also feel that PSA might deserve some permanent honouary mention somewhere

  39. Kev

    Generally, things like that have happened when someone leaves the XSF, I believe.

  40. SamWhited

    In that case, let's make sure we never mint the position of "Executive Director Emeritus" :)

  41. Kev

    We do have Emeritus members.

  42. Guus

    Those should perhaps get some more exposure?

  43. dwd

    Kev, Yes, but they're not "normal" members - you can't be both.

  44. Kev

    dwd: See what I said earlier about 'when someone leaves the XSF' :)

  45. Guus

    https://xmpp.org/about/xmpp-standards-foundation.html does not list them, nor does https://xmpp.org/community/membership.html

  46. dwd

    Kev, Ah, yes. Missed that, sorry.

  47. Guus

    Who are our Emeritus members?

  48. Kev

    They should be listed on the website.

  49. Kev

    So I wonder if this was something lost in the Great Website Improvement.

  50. Guus

    it is why I asked - couldn't quickly identify them on the website

  51. Guus

    There is this awesome announcement for summit 19 though: https://xmpp.org/community/events.html

  52. Guus

    https://github.com/xsf/xmpp.org/issues/275

  53. Guus

    https://github.com/xsf/xmpp.org/issues/276

  54. Alex

    emeritus members are listed at the end here: https://xmpp.org/about/xsf/members

  55. Alex

    in the past they were proposed on the memberlist and we voted on them.

  56. Guus

    Ah, thanks Alex

  57. Guus

    should we, perhaps, dedicate a bit more of virtual space to them? Define why they're considered emeritus members, for instance?

  58. Kev

    Probably, yes.

  59. SamWhited

    moparisthebest: Possible future update for XEP-0368; I was adding a section to register the SRV services and realized that there's no actual example of what a full direct-TLS SRV record should look like. That would probably make things a lot easier on people creating one.

  60. moparisthebest

    yea it could, I didn't know how much of the SRV spec I should put in there

  61. moparisthebest

    I don't mind more examples or anything though

  62. SamWhited

    I don't think you need any of the SRV spec, just an example of what the thing you're describing actually looks like so I can copy/paste it into bind9 or wherever and call it a day and not read the spec :)

  63. SamWhited

    I started to add an SRV registration, but I was looking at the wrong thing (protocol registry, not service registry) and I don't think there's such a thing as registering a service, so maybe there's nothing to do here. I can't find anything that creates such a registry anyways.

  64. SamWhited

    Or rather, I think it's just part of the port number registry, but since we don't actually have port numbers for this it probably doesn't matter.

  65. jonasw

    hm, it may matter

  66. jonasw

    we should probably get a port for this then

  67. jonasw

    or raise the issue with the people responsible for SRV, because having fixed ports allocated does not make sense in this context

  68. SamWhited

    I don't think there's an issue to raise; we don't have a port, so nothing to do here.

  69. jonasw

    what I mean is: there are several use-cases for SRV records. you don’t want conflicts in the Service field. but you also don’t want to have a port allocation for each of these use cases, because it doesn’t make sense with SRV-native applications (as the port is in the record itself). I don’t think that is covered by the SRV-RFC (by looking at it quickly)

  70. jonasw

    it’s not like we *have* to do anything here, but I wonder what the SRV peoples stance on this is

  71. SamWhited

    We have the protocol registered, so there won't be conflicts in the service field because we'd have to write a new XEP to create a duplicate service under the xmpp-client or xmpp-server protocol.

  72. dwd

    Glancing through RFC 2782, it seems to suggest that if there *is* a name in Assigned Numbers, that's the name to use, but otherwise there's nothing. So maybe nothing is needed.

  73. dwd

    Although https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-gudmundsson-dns-srv-iana-registry-04 - but that seems to have stalled. Seems to be an individual effort - we should probably ask our friendly Area Director what to do.

  74. SamWhited

    we need a dedicated registrar who knows this stuff; I can barely keep just the editor things in my head

  75. dwd

    SamWhited, Agreed. The "XMPP Registrar" is meant to do this, and is currently sort-of the Editor - finding a body to do this would seem sensible.

  76. Kev

    Sam's suffering a little bit from us deciding Editor was too big a job for one person and needed a team...and then Sam ended up being (more or less) the only active person on that team.

  77. dwd

    Kev, Indeed.

  78. SamWhited

    I think it's mostly a matter of tooling and process; the jobs small enough for one person (or could be done by a number of people pretty easily without them getting in eachothers way), there's just a lot of shit to do that could be automated (which I will eventually get fed up enough to do)

  79. SamWhited is not sure why publishing an XEP requires anything more than "merge to master and wait for Travis to email you saying it's published or you broke it"

  80. Kev

    SamWhited: Hysterical Raisins, partly.

  81. Kev

    In the olden days, stuff got pushed to master as a WIP.

  82. SamWhited

    (I have never heard that term; this is great, Kev ++)

  83. jonasw

    SamWhited: which parts could use automation?

  84. Kev

    SamWhited: I got it from a colleague of mine, although I'm happy to take credit.

  85. jonasw

    .oO(<http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hysterical-reasons.html>)

  86. SamWhited

    jonasw: All of it. Any time I have to touch a script (sourcing a python virtualenv, generating the XEP, sending an email, sending an IPR thing, etc.) is a place where I could screw up, and none of it requires human intervention.

  87. jonasw

    SamWhited: I am not familiar with the editor process, but I’m familiar with automating stuff

  88. SamWhited

    Oh reeaallly… be careful what you say out loud :)

  89. jonasw

    *shrug*

  90. jonasw

    I know why I said that :)

  91. dwd

    SamWhited, I can take on XMPP Registrar if nobody else will, I think. Although I'd appreciate borrowing jonasw's automation skillz if he's offering freely.

  92. jonasw

    although I’m not sure what you’d need a python virtualenv for in the editing process.

  93. SamWhited

    jonasw: it uses some texml library that can only be found on an ancient sourceforge repo and doesn't exist in any packaged form that I can find

  94. SamWhited

    But the build process isn't something I want to touch personally; just automating it.

  95. jonasw

    holy the heck wat.

  96. SamWhited

    http://getfo.org/texml/ is how we generate PDFs

  97. jonasw

    yeah, figured from grep + wikipedia

  98. SamWhited

    jonasw: But yah, if you're actually interested in helping automate some stuff, a good one that I think could be done first and easily since it's sort of separate from the rest of the process is signing IPR releases. Just setting up a CLA bot or something so that the first time people make a PR on GitHub it makes them sign the release would be super helpful.

  99. SamWhited

    I forget to send it all the time, and I'm sure that's a bad thing for some reason.

  100. jonasw

    what is CLA?

  101. Kev

    Contributor License Agreement

  102. jonasw

    SamWhited: fun though, I think you owe me an IPR release then.

  103. SamWhited

    Yah, we don't have one of those, but the bots could be used for making people sign our intellectual property release just the same way

  104. SamWhited

    jonasw: Do I? Probably…

  105. jonasw

    are you specifically talking about that thing here? https://clabot.github.io/

  106. SamWhited

    not specifically; there are a ton of them. No idea which ones are good or nto.

  107. SamWhited

    *not

  108. moparisthebest

    SamWhited, so re https://github.com/xsf/xeps/pull/447 my only nit is it doesn't say it needs registered in the ALPN section anymore, there are a lot of TLS extensions on that page

  109. SamWhited

    moparisthebest: Oops; yah, not sure how to do that and make it an entity which can be linked elsewhere. Maybe it doesn't matter; the main thing I was trying to do is just not make the link the word "here" (these are printed too)

  110. moparisthebest

    yea I don't like linked here's either

  111. moparisthebest

    maybe just mention these ALPN Protocol IDs need registered then?

  112. SamWhited

    makes sense, I'll try to improve the wording. Or we can just ditch this PR, I only made it because I thought I needed to add an SRV section, but then I didn't so I just removed it and submitted the tweaks I'd done for readability

  113. moparisthebest

    I like the rest of the tweaks