[JDEV] Extra namespaces for legacy protocols?

[Bart van Bragt]

David 'TheRaven' Chisnall wrote:
> A lot of the discussion recently has indicated that the legacy protocols 
> are not feature-compatible with jabber.  Perhaps we need to:
- Nothing :D

It has been stated before but I'm going to repeat it; making Jabber 
understand all the proprietary IM features of the big four is going to 
take a LOT of time. Time that can be spent doing actually useful stuff ;)

Just take a look at programs like Trillian and GAIM. They have existed 
for years now and they still don't completely interoperate with the 
legacy systems. Now please consider that the sole purpose of 
Trillian/GAIM is/was to interoperate with those systems. For the Jabber 
community interoperation is just an added bonus, nothing more.

Another point to consider: who is going to create all those JEPs and who 
is going to implement them? The MSNM transport has been without a 
maintainer for years! If there was such a huge interest in creating 
transports then someone would have maintained that project. Problem is 
that users are interested in the transports and most developers are not 
:D Transports for legacy systems are just not sexy enough and they are a 
pest to create and maintain.

I would suggest that we concentrate on the functionality that we have at 
the moment and improve that, make that work reliably (which is not 
exactly the case at the moment). IMO that will already be more work than 
we can find developers for. Having stuff like offline MSN messages, 
filetransfers, voice chat, etc, etc, are really nice but they take huge 
amounts of time to (properly) implement. IMO that's not 'our' task. If 
people are so addicted to their legacy system they can either install 
both the original legacy client and a Jabber client or install something 
like GAIM/Trillian. Those programs are specialised in this 
interoperation, please let them do the work and let's not reinvent the 
wheel... again :D

IMO time is much better spent in creating a jabberd that is as easy to 
install/configure as your average IMAPd :D

Cheers,

BartVB