Re: Proposing gobby?

[Eric Larson <elarson novell com>]

On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 12:17 +0000, jonobacon gmail com wrote:
> On 11/16/05, Ross Burton <ross burtonini com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 11:54 +0000, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
> > >   I subscribe the good opinion about Gobby, generally, but the security
> > > of its network protocol leaves a lot to be desired.
> >
> > Agreed: whilst I'd like to use Gobby, the fact that the data is sent in
> > plain-text isn't good.  Some way of authenticating the servers/peers are
> > who they say they are (think ssh host key fingerprints), and encrypted
> > transport streams would be required before I'd use it for work.
> 
> It seems to me that a collaborative editing feature in GNOME would be
> a really killer feature, but it should really happen in the
> applications that we all know and love. I would much prefer to use a
> GEdit, Abiword and ultimately OOo plugin to do this. What Gobby could
> offer is a library to handle this and a standard UI for establishing
> and maintaining connections. This would sacrifice Gobby for inclusion,
> but open the possibility for a general GNOME feature - Live
> Collaboration.

It seems that the Gobby developers should provide a better idea
regarding the intended use cases for Gobby. The argument that one would
rather edit in something like GEdit may not really address the purpose
of Gobby. Following the same logic, this potentially makes the lack of
security features more understandable as well. I say this because one
tool that addresses a specific collaboration need is better than forcing
users to understand applications like Abiword, X-Chat and GEdit out of
their original scope. 

To put this another way, why sacrifice the usability of something like
Abiword or GEdit to support a corner case when Gobby can handle it more
gracefully. This is the same for security concerns. Why force Gobby to
deal with security when it may never really be needed. When it was used
at GNOME summit, I don't believe that anyone would have any problems if
someone was listening in on collaboration. This may be the primary use
case (collaboration under a locally controlled network) they may merely
need to be emphasized. 

I am not sure what this does as far as including it in GNOME, but I
think people should definitely understand the purpose of Gobby before
arguing that the ideas should be translated to another application or
that it is missing key features. 

Eric