[JDEV] Extra namespaces for legacy protocols?

[Rachel Blackman]

> 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.

This is /exactly/ what I was trying to say.  The GAIM team, the Trillian
team... we spend /all our time/ hacking apart the existing protocols, and
it's still quite a bit of work.  It's bad enough adding native support for
them, and having to translate them into Jabber would only complicate the
matter.  The easiest way to get people on without losing legacy contacts is
going to be to point them at GAIM, or Trillian, or Fire, or whatever, and
encouraging all the multi-network clients to support Jabber.

The Jabber dev community's time is better spent improving Jabber.  Don't
look at how to emulate and map the existing IM systems into Jabber; if you
do that, you'll constrain yourself by what they do.

What I /want/ to do, eventually, as I said is to sit down and start writing
JEPs for all the features the other IM systems have.  Not to directly map,
but to look at what users want from those features.  To implement clean,
understandable JEPs which provide similar /or preferably better/
implementations of the features.  Ideally even to write reusable client
libraries for some of the more complex stuff (Jabber voice chat, whatever),
to release out there freely.  I'd like to sit down with other authors, like
the GAIM team and the Psi team and so on, to come up with these JEPs and
libraries.

I think that's a more valuable path for Jabber than trying to play
catch-up.  As has been pointed out, the transports are already horribly far
behind.

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

You haven't worked with Cyrus IMAPd, have you? ;)

-- 
Rachel Blackman <rcb at ceruleanstudios.com>
Trillian Messenger - http://www.trillian.cc/
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