[JDEV] On Privacy/Invisibility (aka: Buddy Permit/Deny)

[Jim Seymour]

Hi All,

I've been working on the Jabber plugin for Gaim.  One of the features
requested is support for "AIM-style" buddy permit/deny.  As I
understand it, the way AIM handles this is that you set one of four
"modes": permit all, deny all, permit some or deny some.  For the
latter two: you also send along the list of those permitted or denied.

With server release 1.4.1, I found this model difficult to achieve, at
best.  (At least not w/o maintaining a lot of local state information.
E.g.: who you've denied in the past so if you later want to permit
them, you can make the appropriate presence/roster changes.)

This JEP was brought to my attention

    JEP-0016: Server-Based Privacy Rules (jabber:iq:privacy)
    http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0016.html

I had considered submitting comments to the author.  (For example:
"white- listing" needs to go in right at the start, IMHO.)  In the
mean-time, server 1.4.2 has been released.  In the docs for that I find

    JEP-0018: Presence
    http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0018.html

This seems to duplicate/trump/obsolete/whatever, JEP-0016, in a way?

As you might imagine, I'm wondering what to think of all this.

Lastly, in any event, it seems to me the client code will have to know
what version of the server it's dealing with so it can know what is
supported and what is not.  (E.g.: 1.4.1 won't support "invisible,"
1.4.2 does.)  Is there a way to fetch the server's release level?


Thanks,
Jim
-- 
Jim Seymour                  | PGP Public Key available at:
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