Re: gnustep.org domain

[Ivan Vučica]

I appreciate everyone's feedback. I will not be pushing for this or moving on with setup.

I'd just like to share a few thoughts on why I even brought this up, and why it might have been worthwhile if more people were interested. So, in case anyone is interested:

I believe it's a good thing to see if a person is online and what's the status of that person, and to see whether the individual can be talked to or not. IRC has a very poor concept of status, and has no personal roster. And, XMPP can be leveraged for more than just IMing - it's an interesting 'pipe' for other data as well.

Some of us already use XMPP, perhaps through Gmail, perhaps otherwise. I've set up my own server since Google's disabling XMPP federation (and doing so in a weird way that makes Google Hangouts contacts' status displayed to external XMPP contacts, but who in turn receive absolutely nothing from the outside). 

Considering the above, I thought it might be interesting to have a GNUstep-specific roster with a GNUstep-specific domain. But even more importantly, once Google shuts down federation, it would permit GNUstep developers (and, optionally, others) to use this server to connect to the XMPP network. Not that it's impossible today; it just might be more convenient.

Finally, XMPP is trivial to use from the web (considering that exposing the protocol over HTTP is even specified in some of the XEPs, so it's a standard feature in XMPP servers). I've even written a (bad) library and client myself, primarily because existing clients drop the 'connection' when leaving a page; I've done mine in order to serialize enough state when the user leaves the page. And since there are far better client libraries, a public chatroom would have been trivial to do.

Of course, there is no need to run an XMPP server for gnustep.org just to expose a chatroom; there are enough web clients for IRC already.

But, the whole thing would have felt a bit more 'complete'.

So I thought I'd ask.

I'll nonetheless look into dealing with the web, later on. If it can look nicer, I'll send over the URL to whatever I come up with. And at least now we know who's responsible for the domain :-)

On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 11:33 AM, David Chisnall <theraven@sucs.org> wrote:

On 18 Jul 2013, at 09:32, Richard Frith-Macdonald <richardfrithmacdonald@gmail.com> wrote:

> I kind of agree ... when I'm at the computer I'm working on something (whether it's paid work or GNUstep work) and concentrating on what I'm doing.  That means, for me, that instant messaging and similar social media tools are horrible distractions which cause me to lose track of what I'm doing, so I always have them turned off.
> Anything that can wait, I do on email. If it can't wait (or is just too complicated or unclear to do in email), then text chat is far too slow for me and I need speech... which in practice means phone or skype.

I believe this attitude is a great way of convincing potential users and developers that GNUstep is a dead project.  I am usually in the Étoilé IRC channel and a number of FreeBSD channels on efnet.  When people log in and ask a question, they may not get an immediate response, but they do get a fairly timely one and, more importantly, they get an impression that developers are active participants in the wider community.

I agree with both Richard and David here. To avoid being disturbed, I've 'trained' my contacts to take notice of my status -- I try to keep it up to date. If its type is 'busy', I'd prefer not to be disturbed. If its message says that I'm mobile, then try to contact me as if the message was an SMS. (Now if only clients actually implemented various flags in extensions of the standard that allow specifying that the user is mobile,  that would be even more amazing. Since they don't...)

If someone sends me something frivolous, I can easily notify the sender that they are disturbing me. That commonly does the trick.

In the end, even if I'm logged in I tend not to be disturbed.

And in case Richard is referring to the temptation to make use of IM and other social tools while working: for me personally, it's easy to forget the client is there. Having Internet connection at all is a far greater issue. There weren't so many interesting things online thirteen years ago...

Being out there for the users may be worth going back to IRC. It's certainly been a while since I used IRC regularly for anything.

A successful open source project needs more than good code, it needs good communication and a good community.  GNUstep has a great community, but does a very good job at hiding this from the world.  I don't think this necessarily requires using XMPP (I probably won't join an XMPP chat room until Alex finishes implementing multi-user chat in XMPPKit, as I have failed to find time to do it in the last few years).

I agree, this definitely does not require use of XMPP. I just like having statuses in the private roster as well as chatrooms.

When it comes to MUC support, it might be worth taking a look at the XMPP.framework project and see if it can be built for GNUstep.

--

Ivan Vučica

ivan@vucica.net