Re: jabber.gnome.org's future

[Maciej Piechotka <uzytkownik2 gmail com>]

On Mon, 2013-03-04 at 22:11 -0800, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>
> wrote:
>         On Mon, 2013-03-04 at 14:59 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
>         
>         > The only way it would make sense to me is if we had some
>         expectation
>         > that over time that the number of users would grow to a
>         significant
>         > fraction of the GNOME membership.
>         
>         
>         I understand the maintenance burden, and that it's not
>         worthwhile
>         for only a small handful of users. But it's clear from the
>         thread
>         that most people didn't even know we have an XMPP server. How
>         many
>         users would we have if we actually publicized it?
>         
>         I do think we should push XMPP harder and build more services
>         on
>         top of it, and having a server for members can help us
>         prototype
>         stuff like that. But I'm not writing the code or maintaining
>         the
>         server, so meh...
>
>
>
> I think the point is well taken that the service never really got a
> chance because it wasn't well advertised.  I can imagine from a
> sysadmin perspective that XMPP would serve some interesting use cases
> for alerting for system events or other things or maybe build
> failures.
>
>
> I have a hard time though thinking it is a superior chat system
> compared to IRC.  Mostly because, we have bots, we have just added
> some new IRC services.  Plus some of us run irc under screen, giving
> us 24/7 access to chat so we don't miss conversations.
>
>
> I think XMPP has a place, but chatting isn't one of them.
>
> sri 

Well - except those who don't have shell account so they are
disconnected every time the computer suspends or the network connection
is down (or simply don't like CLI for chat). In many cases I would
prefer to be able to read retrospectively what happened on channels then
to have to be there all the time.

In addition the Jabber services are secured by SSL/TLS (at least
irc.gnome.org is not by default in epiphany) so there is no risk of
password sniffing when one authenticate to bots, there is autologin
(just choose strong unique password and enter it into client, check
remember and you don't need to be worrying about next password to
remember). My guess is that it could be integrated with LDAP so there is
single log in to GNOME accounts. 

Finally there are XMPP-IRC bridges which would allow gradual (or even
partial) move (disclaimer: I have no idea how advanced they are and I
have never used them).

That said I understand the maintenance burden and that I might be
minority.

Best regards

PS. I didn't knew about the Jabber service either.