[jdev] Thread IDs - The Reality?

[Tijl Houtbeckers]

On Thu, 11 Aug 2005 19:25:40 +0200, Julian Missig <julian at jabber.org>  
wrote:

> On 11 Aug 2005, at 11:30, Kevin Smith wrote:
>
>>>> But what do you think the feasibility of
>>>> me writing patches for some of the popular open source clients is?
>>
>> It depends what you want I guess; people might be reticent to apply
>> patches that complicate the ui, such as having genuine
>> multithreaded chats, but probably willing (provided they're better
>> at managing patches than me ;)) to commit a patch that makes the
>> client assign a thread to a chat window.
>
> Exactly. Focus on getting clients to maintain thread IDs and generate
> new ones automatically. Even if they're not completely accurate, it's
> better than nothing.

I would disagree. Clients that don't support true "multithreading" should  
not be sending out or replying to thread ID's. After all there is no  
thread. The only way for other clients to find out wether another client  
supports threads or not is by doing this.

When a client sends back messages of type="chat" without a thread ID, then  
you know there's only "one thread". (thus clients that do support multiple  
threads know not to open more than one thread to that clients, because  
messages would get mixed up between them). What else would you want a  
thread ID for? To maintain some sort of session? The behaviour for that is  
*very* undefined, so I would advise not to rely on it.