[JDEV] Invisibility and transports

[Jim Seymour]

Julian Missig <julian at jabber.org> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 2002-07-12 at 17:27, Jim Seymour wrote:
[snip]
> > 
> > Reading this and the other follow-ups, it sounds like the only solution
> > to this problem, for now, is that instead of sending a presence type
> > invisible to the server, send it to each individual JID?  Seems kind of
> > abusive to the server...
[snip]
> 
> No, send the invisible packet, then send it individually to the
> transports/users you want to see you as invisible.

But ...

Thomas Muldowney <temas at box5.net> had written:
: I'm remembering old conversations about this now, and the problem was
: that everything is just a JID and distinguishing tranports is a non
: trivial task (because they could be remote).  So it's best to just go
: offline/invis and let the clients deal with it if they want to. 
: Although that really strains the transports oddly since they kill the
: session and then immediately bring it back up.

That's what I was thinking of when I surmised that just sending
individual invisible's was the simplest solution.  What am I missing?

One thing which I don't understand regarding how the transports handle
this: why don't they just understand what the invisible bit means and
do the right thing?  I'm guessing that the answer is here:

Matthias Wimmer <m at tthias.net> had written:
: The problem with it is, that the Jabber server doesn't send the 
: <presence type='invisible'/> packet to the transports. Invisibility and 
: transports only work if the Jabber client sends an addresses invisible 
: <presence/> to a transport.

And the alleged response to that, paraphrased, was "server-side implied
logic suxx."

Eh?  Far be it from me to question the wisdom of people who've been
working on Jabber much longer than I, and presumably understand its
logic and where y'all are going with it much better than I, but this
quite frankly doesn't make sense to me.  I would *think* the purpose of
the transports is to "protocol convert" between Jabber and protocol X.
ISTM that would include such things as "invisible."  Forcing each and
every client to individually deal with such things on a
protocol-by-protocol basis does not make sense to me.


Regards,
Jim
-- 
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