[JDEV] JEPs and Jabber Adoption

[Peter Millard]

+100. 'nuff said. Thats me as a client author, and me as a council member. I'd
like nothing more than to see this finished before a new council is elected.

pgm.

Paul Curtis wrote:
> I normally avoid all of the conflicts surrounding JEPs, as I am rather
> content to implement than to propose. However, in my one year of active
> participation in the Jabber community, I have watched as proposals for
> much needed features have been sidelined, retracted, or left for dead
> because of lack of community concensus.
>
> The point of a community is community, and not competition. In addition,
> the JEP process, and the XMPP protocol itself, makes it easy to
> implement a feature and extend it later. Isn't that one of the
> touchstones of the protocol itself? "Extensible" is part of the name ...
> it's not just a word or phrase, but rather a methodology for this protocol.
>
> So, where am I going with this? I have watched a single, much needed,
> and frequently requested feature get "reinvented" three times in the
> space of a year. Rather than trying to make it perfect from the start,
> let the community agree on the current proposed enhancements as a
> starting point. This will give the client developers and the users
> something that works, while not perfect for every need, will meet the
> needs of 90% of the user base.
>
> I stand in an untenable position: having promoted Jabber and XMPP
> internally to my company, I have to explain that a fundamental feature
> that every legacy IM system has is absent in Jabber and XMPP. The
> community needs to support this feature to even be on the same playing
> field as the "competition" that is already out there.
>
> What is this feature? File transfer. Currently, the community needs to
> find any major flaw with the existing JEPs mentioned below, and forward
> them all as a group to last call. These four JEPs will give the
> Jabber/XMPP users what they really want.
>
> Now, are these JEPs perfect? Probably not. But, then again, neither was
> SMTP (RFC 822 & 2822). There are many extension RFCs to SMTP to enhance
> its usability and to add features that are not necessarily used by many
> systems in the "mainstream". The JEPs I'm speaking about are:
>    * JEP-0042 Inband Bytestreams (the lowest common denominator for file
> transfers)
>    * JEP-0065 SOCKS bytestreams
>    * JEP-0096 Stream Initiation
>    * JEP-0096 File Transfer Initiation
>
> With these four, the Jabber community can cover that 90% of the user
> base. Without them, I'll have to wait out yet another file transfer JEP
> (or JEPs) to be dissected and argued over. If that is the case, then I
> can't continue to be a proponent of the Jabber community, because the
> community is not acting in its best interest.
>
> We, as a community, have lost active participants over the course of the
> year because of petty arguing. We, as a community, cannot afford to lose
> any more (or anyone at all) at this point. XMPP stands to take over as a
> "standard" IM protocol. We need to have this capability ironed out and
> solid when that happens.
>
> Let's take these four JEPs, remove any major flaws, add any major
> omissions, and finalize them now. I can't stand to wait for another
> complete restart on file transfer, and I'm getting less and less willing
> to extoll the virtues of the protocol and community when something like
> this cannot be agreed upon.
>
> paul