XSF Discussion - 2019-02-25

I know I'm late to the party but I don't agree arguing vs. Matrix is bad and counter-productive. As a user I may well be interested in the pros and cons as seen by those involved in the protocols.

Holger: 👍

Know thy bias

It's quite common that participants in discussions are biased :-)

I also don't understand this: several XMPP folks walk around and try to convince some communities to install XMPP instead of Matrix (KDE is such an example, I think Seve tried to convince them, I also recall that Licaon_Kter were trying the same in another community). So, if we don't "fight", let's just give up and let them installing Matrix? So those XMPP folks are just wasting time?

Holger: I think it's all about being polite and open to feedback and insights from the other side.

Also I'm ashamed about how some of "us" are bashing "them" on every possible occasion

yeah, people are obsessed with politeness

facts don't matter anymore even in high-tech community, you just need to be polite

zinid: facts don't matter as long as you are impolite, in any community, since ever. Except when you are the dictator and can just ignore people's feelings.

how does the fact relates to politeness?

the earth is not flat, whatever you like it to be

Ge0rG: That's just not true. Different people, different tone, in any community, since ever. I feel it's a more recent-ish fashion to discuss tone all day, but you won't change it no matter how much energy you put into such meta discussions.

I also find it strange to focus on the tone endlessly

We focus on tone as yours is actively scaring people away. I understand that you don't consider your tone to be offensive. However, it is to a lot of people that do not share your background. This is how you can do damage to the community as a whole, even when your intentions are nobel. When discussing in a group of people with mixed backgrounds, it is best to err on the side of caution.

you see, again this 😀

Yes, and I will, as long as I feel that you are hurting the community.

Guus: thanks, that's exactly what I wanted to say, but lacked the right words for

Guus, who is the community?

this room?

A mix of people of varied backgrounds.

yeah, very precise definition

"the people who want to make XMPP more successful" would be a better one.

So this was just all about tone. I'm sorry I stirred this up.

Guus, btw, did you think that Matrix did more harm to our community by attracting them to Matrix?

zinid: Matrix didn't do harm to our community. We did that harm by not providing the same perceived quality as Matrix.

we...

(part of that is also yelling at our users)

I think XMPP was very complacent before Matrix. Now that they're around, we are more motivated to get things up to spec.

Ge0rG, I never heard that someone switched to Matrix because XMPP community is agressive

Guus, you mean forced? :P

zinid, I've had various talks with people that think XMPP people are acting like dicks.

Guus, and I didn't

I mean I never heard that

zinid, I have been trying to tell you over and over and over.

zinid: maybe because you've got a reputation?

Guus: "Now that they're around, we are more motivated to get things up to spec." Really? I argued against someone making that statement just this morning. You feel XEP or software development is pushed by the competition from Matrix?

Ge0rG, so it's "you" but "we"?

Ge0rG, so it's "me" who hurt the community, but hypothetical "we" when you want to describe your failure?

Holger I didn't see that disccussion (was it here), but I do think that it, for instance, Matrix has shown what the effect is of XMPP clients generally offering bad UX/UI.

I sure don't feel like we're chasing Matrix. I just wanna sit in my corner and make things better.

Holger I didn't see that disccussion (was it here?), but I do think that it, for instance, Matrix has shown what the effect is of XMPP clients generally offering bad UX/UI.

note that I'm silent at all outside of these few rooms, I don't see how I can hurt the community

zinid: you have a very aggressive tone on HN, and in discussions here and in the other MUCs

Guus: Not sure we needed Matrix to show that, even less sure we improved anything due to Matrix :-)

Ge0rG, I have 3 posts at HN, and I'm joined 3 rooms (one of them is ejabberd and I don't hurt anyone there at all)

Holger: we _knew_ it, but we didn't act on it. "since matrix", I've been trying harder to improve things.

First, matrix official client riot is quite a piece of something not very good. Slow, blinking and often crashing.

so maybe it's just me 🙂

Ge0rG, so I ruined everything by 3 posts?

(but I think it's more than just me)

So I don't know about what perceived quality you are talking

Skype was a terrible client too. Yet percieved as better than XMPP.

Second, on zinid's tone. I think he did (and does) more for xmpp than most. Ejabberd is great server.

Something something marketing

And network effect

Thing is, you are not looking with your average user eyes

Guus, indeed, maybe it's just you? Maybe it's something not related to the tone?

Andrew Nenakhov: 👍

Andrew Nenakhov: doing good things for the community isn't a permit to behave like an asshole, though.

but, it's not just UX: it also follows things like funding, marketing, getting your foot behind the door of larger organizations - there's much that we can learn from them.

Guus: ...having a good easy-to-deploy coroprate setup.

(Note that there's much that they can learn from us too - but more interested in learning from them 🙂 )

Ge0rG: Awesome tone of yours.

Ge0rG, maybe then the XSF will remove those pages where they describe XMPP usages because of my tone? The majority of use cases are ejabberd

Seve: Yeah, I don't have the same requirements or preferences as your average user. Often the excat inverse actually :)

Ge0rG, and maybe the XSF will put the usages created by people from the XMPP "community"?

zinid: what's your point, again?

Ge0rG, my point is that you need to be consistent

at one hand I'm hurting the community, at another hand you use my product to promote XMPP

zinid: I am. I appreciate you doing good development work for the community, while disliking your tone in public discussions.

I need to go -- be back in about an hour

zinid: I'm interested in your professsional opinion on protocol matters, and that even includes ranting about XEP ugliness.

Ge0rG, me too, but your tone is not that great at all

so it's not you who should tell me about the tone

"Andrew Nenakhov> Second, on zinid's tone. I think he did (and does) more for xmpp than most. Ejabberd is great server.", This is just like saying "My husband beats me but he also buys me everything I want he's a great husband", (sorry zinid I didn't have any other comparison in mind :p)

zinid: I'm guilty of a good share of ranting myself, yeah. But I try to rant about things I know about, like XMPP, in the respective community, including this place.

I remember recently we shared an alpha build to our upcoming grrreat xmpp client for iOS, and certain member of community started concentrating on incomplete add contact screen imstead of marvelling at consistent work with message archive, beautiful chat interface, beautiful vcards, capabilities to send files and media...

zinid: and I also tend to adapt my tone to the "incoming" tone, which is not the best of practices.

Calling it a 'mockup' of an app. 😐

Andrew Nenakhov: you can call me out.

Linus parallells?

Riot is ugly and slow indeed, but it's still more usable than anything I've seen on desktop for average user (read: looks like normal messaging app). I didn't check stuff recently though.

Andrew Nenakhov: I tried to login with Xabber/iOS, it went from "Authenticating" to "Offline" immediately, with no error message. I wasn't able to add contacts, nor to send or receive messages. What other conclusion should I make than that it's a mockup?

pep., I don't find the comparison correct, but okay 😛

You had to try harder, I guess. It does not go offline for us with our server

I think you guys are mixing topics :)

Seve, that happens all the time when you start discussing "tone" 😀

Andrew Nenakhov: I entered the wrong JID, but it didn't tell me that.

Andrew Nenakhov: on the other hand, I was just using your own words, which you used to describe another iOS client, that actually works in my experience... so there is _really_ no need to feel offended ;)

I'm not the one here preaching politeness and ethics.

> and I also tend to adapt my tone to the "incoming" tone, which is not the best of practices.

I'm actually ok with criticism. Especially when it is aimed at released products

Andrew Nenakhov: so you didn't release the beta to obtain feedback, but ...?

Ge0rG, we also don't release betas btw

We have access to builds cause people were asking

nobody use betas

*We gave

XMPP software has too small user base for betas

And we are open to a constructive feedback and bug reports. Stress on constructive.

Andrew Nenakhov: what about this? > I tried to login with Xabber/iOS, it went from "Authenticating" to "Offline" immediately, with no error message. I wasn't able to add contacts, nor to send or receive messages.

Like, filed issues on GitHub. "I can't connect to xabber.org server, app immediately goes offline".

Issues: 0

Andrew Nenakhov: is https://github.com/redsolution/xabber-ios/issues the right place?

That's not a constructive feedback but whining on a muc channel that I rarely visit in my spare time.

Yes, that's the place

Andrew Nenakhov, Ge0rG is too proud to create issues, he only can make such advices, double standards, that is

Ge0rG doesn't report issues?

I just tested Xabber Web, works and looks really nice, this is not open-source though? (thinking about self-hosting and adding support for HTTP Upload)

So those 61 issues in our issue tracker is an illusion then? :)

Zash, yeah, he only creates issues in "right" software projects

double standards again

Wiktor, it's agpl and not only it does support sending files, but probably does it im a very advanced way

Why do you have to use superlatives all the time :x

Wiktor: The problem is no MUC support.

Andrew Nenakhov, oh, I didn't spot the link to source, I found that xabber accounts have file upload but my own that supports http upload :0 didn't work

Holger, oh, I didn't go as far as that in my tests, thanks for input

for the record here's the source: https://github.com/redsolution/xabber-web

Wiktor: They do a custom MUC replacement.

ah, yep, now I recalled that, got it

pep.: superlatives is the key to the reality distortion field, don't you know?

zinid: https://github.com/processone/ejabberd/issues?utf8=✓&q=is%3Aissue+author%3Age0rg is not as impressive as with other projects, but I'm not even a user of ejabberd.

Ge0rG, I'm aware of those, yes

zinid: I'm with Guus here. Please tone down.

Ge0rG, my tone is fine, please back off

zinid: "Ge0rG is too proud to create issues, he only can make such advices, double standards, that is"

zinid: oh, wait. I didn't see the </s>

Is this going to end with a CoC?

Zash: only if it's St. Benedicts.

nah, they don't need CoC to ban XMPP developers 😉

Andrew Nenakhov: also in the past, I've had some questionable experience with reporting issues to xabber-* projects. https://github.com/redsolution/xabber-android/issues/839 is the less controversial one.

Andrew Nenakhov, what XMPP servers don't support MAM pagination?

(re https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.xabber.android&reviewId=gp%3AAOqpTOHSQsuOQ0KIwNFHOY0ECYRaQZ4PVHpQppwVRTmXr8z06YGRbaP5M32yrq9RericFG1i3UlA4cMhN9SJE8M )

Even our own community members are spreading FUD, yay

> Why do you have to use superlatives all the time :x How many clients you know that can send several images at once and present a niiice gallery to view them? Or send voice messages?

Ge0rG, if you are that bothered by our vCard handling you can send us a pull request.

Andrew Nenakhov: is that your answer to all my issues?

Andrew Nenakhov: I will be glad to send you pull requests for everything you ask me to, you just need to pay my employer our standard consulting fee.

MattJ, you are out of context about pagination. Guy was asking why we load many messages - but we load only 1 (one) message from every conversation.

And there is no way to load all recent conversations but by polling all contacts I roster

And since answers on Google play are limited to just 350characters there is no much space for details

Because per our customer service policy we also have to insult jerky entitled commenters

😀

First the "You know nothing!" is nice, and then I understood it exactly as MattJ did. It's really badly explained in that answer. "XMPP servers DO NOT support pagination" can mean quite a few things

memberbot is online and will accept your votes for the Q1-2019 membership applications

You know nothing, Jon Snow. :)

Ge0rG, oh so we have to fix your problems with our app for free then, but you are willing to change us your standard consulting fee, uh oh

Alex, thanks!

Thanks Alex.

pep., Yes, technically you are right. We should have been more technically precise

Andrew Nenakhov: I report problems with your app for free, and I expect that you at least fix protocol violations.

Andrew Nenakhov: you are paying your developers to write the app, so why shouldn't I expect you to pay me to fix your code, if you want me to do it for you? :P

There was a guy somewhere here who was running around GitHub and spamming all the projects with nonsense issues like compatibility suite. I think he was thinking that he was doing a great community service.

A voté !

Just saying.

Ge0rG, if you are having a problem with our code, I don't expect you to fix it, but to wait till we get to fixing it. If you are really impatient you may send us a fix, we rarely turn down PRs

Andrew Nenakhov, he is right now ranting in ejabberd@ room 😀

we don't want to support his precious SCRAM-SHA-256 🙁

Lazy developer asses you are!

Andrew Nenakhov, hum, I thought XMPP is all about endless discussions and meetings, no? Should we implement something? I'm confused 🤔

Have you read a post-meritocracy manifesto?

no

These core values and principles are: We do not believe that our value as human beings is intrinsically tied to our value as knowledge workers. Our professions do not define us; we are more than the work we do. We believe that interpersonal skills are at least as important as technical skills. We can add the most value as professionals by drawing on the diversity of our identities, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. Homogeneity is an antipattern.

https://postmeritocracy.org/

how does this relate? stop confusing me, plz

I mean, we are doing everything wrong by trying to build something.

We must be friendly and open an inclusive

And then things will somehow get themselves done

By our welcoming community.

I think we haven't addressed the elephant in the room that is the language barrier

Andrew Nenakhov, we also need to attract those pissed minority, they will do the job for us 😀

zinid, so now you plan to EXPLOIT offended minorities??! You monster.

I just suggest the solutions

and you only criticize me

Ok guys jokes aside, have to go off chat. Need to oversee updates to three xmpp clients and some more projects. Unfortunately so far we don't have any minorities in our team (though gender diversity is pretty high, 40% of our developer team are females!)

out of?

Currently, there are 5 developers plus one sysamin and me

Cool :)

Also one fringe member who works on designing required protocol extensions

Andrew Nenakhov: it would be great if you could triage incoming bug requests and say whether you are going to fix them or not, and if yes then on which time frame

Actually we have trouble keeping up with GitHubs tracker. We treat is a public backlog for now, and we rely on internal redmine tracker for real development.

Problem with GitHub is that it gets spammed all to quickly with all sorts of request, so it takes a lot of time just to sort it,

Andrew Nenakhov, I agree, I've seen this problem with another project I've been involved with, too much noise

+1, and if you don't address that spam your bugtracker looks like a pile of 💩

Just close down the tracker then?

just cut off the head, yeah

Some day in the future we'll hire a support team and will probably retain issue creation for team only.

So to file bug report users will need to email their problem to us and we'll publish only verified issues.

But this may also work bad. So for the time being we're mostly treating GitHub issues like a toxic dump and try to avoid it :(

Andrew Nenakhov: let me try to find a better phrasing for my point: if you want people to report more issues, you should have a process where reported issues are at least categorized on a somewhat timely scale.

Andrew Nenakhov: some hours ago, you asked me to report my issues on github.

They actually are. I add labels to them!

Xabber for Web GitHub tracker so far had zero issues, so it was less dreadful 😁

Andrew Nenakhov: so you only want me to report on github about xabber-web and xabber-ios but not about xabber-android? :D

Also, your bug reports are pointless and wasteful.

Andrew Nenakhov: okay, so you don't want me to report issues at all?

This is an incomplete portion of app, so it just works for us. What is the point reacting on it when we know we'll rebuild everything there?

Andrew Nenakhov: so you admit it's just a mockup? 😁

Probably yes, Georg, you better not report issues to us. Use some Dino or Gajim or Conversations or even Yaxim.

Ge0rG, no, it's a very functional xmpp client that has a couple of incomplete interfaces, both of which are truly trivial.

Andrew Nenakhov: point taken.

You see, what's the point making beautiful login interface for an app if we suspect there will be some trouble down the road that we might not be able to solve?

So we concentrate on hard things first. Trivial things and polish later.

Zash a couple of weeks ago you were about to test something in Openfire - there was a breakdown of s2s somewhere halfway in our conversation - were you able to reproduce that issue?

initial presence echo, I think was what the issue related to.

Guus: Hmm, can you provide more hints to help me remember?

Ah. I think I found that to be working now.

\o/

Thanks

edhelas - that's one of your issues with Openfire, btw.

so hopefully, that's gone now.

Guus: If you want a project for the day, try getting scansion ( MattJs test runner) up and running :)

Zash I'm actually interested - but it's one of a long list of awesome stuff I want do get done 🙂

> Guus: ...having a good easy-to-deploy coroprate setup. You mentioned that earlier, Ge0rG - that's actually something that Openfire strives to do. Any thoughts/pointers there?

Hold on, I'm under the impression that that's already a strong point of Openfire, leave some for us too ;)

Guus: I haven't run openfire yet, but having a short introduction article on how to host it with all mobile features enabled, and integrate it with your AD and stay compliant to GDPR, would be great.

Zash you get _all other_ stuff 🙂

GDPR is something we haven't touched on

LDAP (AD?) integration you get out of the box

'all mobile features' likely means enabling some plugins, that we're planning to ship as a default set in the future.

Guus [13:48]: > GDPR is something we haven't touched on That's a tough sell in the EU

Ge0rG - if you think that 'easy corporate setup' fills an important gap in what we have for XMPP, I'd love for you to look at Openfire for that - see if we can improve it more in just that (I think, like Zash suggests, its already pretty well on its way in that direction). I do see value for Openfire to specialize there.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

Guus I hope XEP-0357: Push Notifications is in your long list of awesomeness. It will help reduce the battery power drain when using Conversations with Openfire

dele yes, yes

🙂

Got CSI?

Zash, I have working code that advertises the feature, but as I couldn't find anything that would actually benefit from CSI without breaking spec (mostly the out-of-order restriction, iirc), I've never pushed that.

Guus, in theory a significant benefit comes from just witholding unimportant stanzas for $time and sending them together in batches

Yeah, messing with the ordering is just ... icky.

If you do more than that you're in dangerous territory, and even doing just that requires some work to get right

MattJ It's all a bit further away in my memory, but if I recall correctly, I thought that, practically, there wouldn't be to much value to it.

(I might be very wrong)

https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0286.html#sect-idm45485296239888 > 4.1 Transmit no data > 4.2 When transmitting, transmit as much as you can

That sums up a good strategy.

Harder to quantify that tho

Yeah - I was basically wondering if it effectively is worth the added complexity of CSI, in practice. That's why I held off.

Guus, look up the study that found the Pandora music streaming client used 90% of its battery consumption on 2% of the traffic (because it downloaded all the track at the start [good], and then sent periodic pings back to the server [bad])

MattJ but doesn't SM affect that more than CSI?

I think it is possible that even a trival CSI server implementation just withholding presence stanzas would have an measurable impact on battery life

Wasn't that part of SM removed?

flow if that's true, then I sit here corrected.

my completely uneducated guess was that that's not a meaningful change

(as there's plenty of traffic that would cause the buffer to flush)

Plenty of presence can be bunched up in batches

Guus, well it clearly depends on the exact use case. But you could possiblly easly measure the longest idle time for the connection and compare the values with and without CSI

or s/use case/user/

Yeah, that's a thought.

Also, I'm not saying that there's absolutely no merit in CSI

Measuring would be good tho

but the discussion I had at the time made me re-evaluate the priority of that added to Openfire

so I kicked that can down the road

So, yeah, GDPR, possibly CSI... what more enterprisy stuff is XMPP lacking? (or do you think is lacking because you've not tried our most awesome server)?

As a self-hosting proponent I'd prefer to see CSI prioritized over push notifications, since that ties into Google and Apple.

_completely_ unrelated: when tailing a logfile, it's easy to put in a marker by hitting enter, which introduces a blank line. Can you do something similar when following in less?

Zash, I don't think that there are self-hosted alternatives to clients running on Google and Apple (apart from web clients that don't have particularly good UX on mobile phones)?

In other words: adding Push Notifications doesn't hurt self-hosting?

CSI doesn't help with mobile OSes killing your app, but it does help with power usage. ✏

I'm not saying CSI is useless - I just wondered how you compared it against push notifications. Support for either XEP would benefit the exact same clients, I think.

Guus, CSI doesn't help if your app is killed, push is handled by system and will start your app if it's not running (e.g. killed by aggressive battery optimization).

Wiktor, that sounds about right

Android clients should all implement VoIP to get past the push business :P

Both are useful, it's just their use-case areas do not overlap perfectly :)

I think I'm confusing people. I didn't want to say either CSI or Push is better or worse than the other. I only didn't understand the argument to prefer Push _as that's better for self-hosting_

doesn't really matter anyways

I was just curious

Conversations has really worked fine for me without any push support (I run the fdroid build)

But then need for agressive murderous battery savings can be mitigated somewhat by CSI

Guus, no that's the opposite, **to prefer CSI

pep. err, right - but my question remains: I'm not seeing that there's a difference for the _self-hosted_ aspect of things.

Using push means I am dependent on the developer's Push server

for self-hosting? push is no problem for server operators, rather to client developers (as they need to operate push proxy server). Or maybe I misunderstood what you meant

If I decide to self-host that push server, that means I have to rebuild the app, and register that to google(?), provide it in the play store etc.

Guus: I don't get no push notifications. So I personally don't directly benefit from push. Mostly it annoys me with implying that XMPP isn't push already.

Zash ok, sure - if you'd not use it even if the feature was available, then it makes sense to want to have a different feature first 🙂

Wiktor no, you did not misunderstand me. That exactly was my confusion.

Okay!

(and I naively assumed that 'self-hosting' only applied to the XMPP server itself)

Yeah, well, I wouldn't use "self-hosting" to describe running your own push node, just like I wouldn't use it to describe forking a client, but that's just semantics I guess

No push notifications in my phone OS that I know of either.

Zash sure, but then you're running something that the vast, vast majority of corporate users isn't running.

for the record there are alternative push services to google, random example: https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/devservice/doc/20102

Fun fact: the first implementation of push notifications for prosody was tested against an SMS API

Which says more about the developer than the intended use case, I think 🙂

intended/expected

:)

The part that sits in the XMPP server doesn't need to know anything about the push server, so why not

MattJ, you mentioned that if XMPP started today, it would not use XML. What do you think would it be, and why?

A good question :)

Probably depends on who started it

The thing is, I personally believe XML was, and still is, a great fit for XMPP

The X in XMPP stands for XML right, there's no way we use something else

The reason is that it has namespaces right there

Namespaces in most formats tend to end up pretty ugly at the end of the day

JSON with namespaces and schema isn't really nicer than XML

this is not a technical question, but marketing

But why use namespaces when you can have everything included (!! No I'm not trying to revive the discussion :p)

XML has bad reputation already

XML got a bad reputation because it was popular and used for things where it wasn't a good fit

Zash, does it matter why?

JSON is used for things today where it's not a good fit.

zinid: Does anything matter?

Zash, yes, something definitely matters

fwiw, I've found that standardizing anything on XML is easier than doing the same on JSON.

but not why XML got "outdated"

Everything gets outdated

and I agree with zinid, XML has a bad reputation - I think that's primarily caused by the fact that it's hard to use for people that use it in a usecase where json is a better fit.

Bring back ASN.1!

Zash, yes!111

let's call it ASN.2

new exciting thingy

ASN.2.0 <-- you need the marketing thingy!

Is binary, has schema, namespaces, all the bells and whistles anyone could want

Or well, ASN.1 is ... the schema?

Zash, I think it's schema + encoding, no?

Seve, none of this answers your question. The answer is probably "HTTP+JSON" and because that's what people use for everything today...

MattJ, yeah, but HTTP+JSON is a very rigid construction, it doesn't fit everything

I would call JSON many things, but not 'rigid'. 🙂

zinid, it's k->v pairs + arrays, it does fit everything :)

Maybe not optimally, but it can be done

Note that I'm not saying it would be a good idea

MattJ: Did you see the thing I played with this morning? It failed sometimes because of the order of keys in JSON objects.

Fun

well, they invented CBOR, which has 1:1 mapping with JSON, why?

CBOR is nice

btw, CBOR is even more compact than ASN.1

zinid: That doesn't make sense

Zash, what exactly?

MattJ, I didn't say anything because I'm interested on the topic and wanted to know what people say. I was just wondering when you mentioned that, if you had some other solution for it that could replace XML today for XMPP or if you had in mind the popularity JSON has these days. Very appreciated :)

Seve, no, I have no better solution in mind

zinid: Is CBOR more compact than PER or the one I forget the name of that's ültra-compact bit packing?

Zash, I think there is comparison with DER in RFC 7049

I wrote a CBOR lib, so I think CBOR is nice. It can fit Lua tables natively, as opposed to JSON.

ah, BER!!!

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7049#appendix-E

CBOR is pretty compact for something that is self-describing

BER & co is also self-describing

> 3. no schema description needed That's a moot advantage of CBOR, tbh

But I imagine schema-aware magic like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packed_Encoding_Rules#Packed_Encoding_Rules can be more compact

Zash, indeed, I think PER is more compact than BER

But then you you lose the self-describingness and need the schema to decode

schemas are awesome

ejabberd internally uses schemas only, no XML parsing

Yep, CBOR is nice, every time I see base64 used nowadays I cry a little as this is just a workaround for the inability to directly store binary...

I still think ASN.1 is the best! Except maybe Cobol'ish syntax, but I can live with that

Can haz CBOR encoding rules

Zash, ah, true

zinid, what kind of schemas do you use in ejabberd exactly?

pep., hand-made

I mean, what schemas, what tech, XML schemas?

schemas doing what

pep., no, erlang'ish, https://github.com/processone/xmpp/blob/master/specs/xmpp_codec.spec

pep., the schema tells the codec how to decode/encode XML into internal Erlang structures

so basically same stuff as ASN.1

interesting

That also builds parsers etc.?

really? Link Mauve is working on the same for Rust, I thought it's already well recognized approach

pep., yes

for the record stanza.io does something similar: https://github.com/legastero/stanza.io/blob/master/src/protocol/stanzas/bookmarks.js#L6-L28

zinid, yes, and I'm also working on it, but we have an XML parser in there

Well, we expect parsed structures already, we don't handle raw strings

pep., well, yes, an XML parser translates into internal XML Erlang representation, then the codec converts the representation into valid Erlang records (kinda structures in C)

Ok. I was confused for a sec

so it has two passes, which is of course not very efficient

But you gain a lot more with that anyway. And it's already way more efficient than doing the same in python, hands down..

pep., <message/> -> #xml{} -> #message{}

Okay

think of #foo{} as a C structure

too bad this can't be derived automatically from schema in xeps :)

Wiktor, indeed

zinid, yeah I get it

yes, so stanza.io guys, myself and Link Mauve are reinventing it from scratch

We do the same in xmpp-parsers anyway

what surprized me, is that ejabberd became faster with such approach

Wiktor: Was this because of the schemas being incomplete or XML schema itself not being capable of expressing things sufficiently?

Completely unsurprised. ^^

Zash, both? I guess, mostly the latter

I remember schemas being incomplete when I tried parsing XSD -> TypeScript using a library (just a PoC), then there were issues with the library not supporting all constructs of XSD correctly

Link Mauve, maybe for you 🙂 but I had doubts back then, I was thinking about slowing a bit

the problem with XML schemas is that you cannot build structures for your language from them

at least I don't know how to do that

Zash, e.g. https://github.com/spreeuwers/xsd2ts/issues/1

I'm not proud of inventing my own schema at all

Yeah, me neither.

But it was mandatory given xsd doesn’t help with internal structs.

well you can build structures but you need to write the xsd -> target language translator first, and that wouldn't be a weekend project, probably with a lot of bugs etc.

Wiktor, yeah

and then write that translator for every Nth language... etc. so making a small DSL now is less work it seems

Aww, now I missed all the ordered JSON and DER discussion, so it's too late to come up with Canonical JSON <https://matrix.org/docs/spec/appendices.html#canonical-json>

"Canonical" 🤔🤔

?

Huhuhu

also no floats

https://bouah.net/2019/02/slixmpp-gets-omemo-support/ !

pep.: you too 😁

I know right

pep.: great!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19247856 for HN clickers

Despite Alex's mail, I'm not getting a response from memberbot

is it online?

It was earlier

lemme check

ah, it started to respond now

just restarted the bot

it responded to my message that I sent 6 minutes earlier

unsure where that got stuck

well, I voted. 🙂

Thanks Alex

(Y)