Re: jabber.gnome.org: a proposal

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

Em Tue, 2013-03-12 às 09:38 -0400, Shaun McCance escreveu:
> On Tue, 2013-03-12 at 09:26 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > Hey,
> >
> > On Mon, 2013-03-11 at 10:03 -0400, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > I think it's clear from the recent thread that most people had
> > > no idea we had a Jabber server, or that they could get accounts
> > > on it, or how to go about doing so.
> > >
> > > What's more, over the last week, I tried to help two people use
> > > their jabber.gnome.org accounts with no success.
> > >
> > > I think it's unfair to judge the popularity of this service when
> > > it has been so buried and so extremely difficult to use.
> > >
> > > It also seems we can't create group chats on jabber.gnome.org,
> > > which limits our ability to use it as an official channel for
> > > GNOME teams.
> > >
> > > I propose that we address these issues to give Jabber a fair
> > > shake. We can then reevaluate its popularity in six months.
> >
> > As I already mentioned privately, I don't think the admins want to have
> > to maintain the OpenFire Jabber server. First, as Olav mentioned,
> > there's no SSL support for a service where you would expect privacy.
> > Furthermore, I would expect the security concerns of running such a big
> > service on GNOME servers to be a burden on the admins.
>
> Is this just because we chose a particularly bad Jabber server?
> I have a hard time believing nobody's figured this out yet.

I guess a lot of XMPP  servers suffer from this. A lot of IM providers
(Facebook, Skype, etc.) offer XMPP interfaces but their internal
protocols aren't XMPP.

> Incidentally, SSL doesn't work on our IRC network. So I get to
> send my password in plain text to register with our new bot.

As mentioned, this isn't your Mango password at least. This has about
the same value as your mailman password.

> > Why not get the GNOME jabber service (co-)hosted somewhere else, where
> > it would be possible to add the features you want?
>
> What would we have to do on the GNOME side to allow this?

The hardest part would be to export our roster. But any number of
service providers that have XMPP as a feature would probably allow us to
use an SRV record to point jabber.gnome.org to jabber.provider.com.

We should try and find a partner that can offer us this sort of service
rather than trying to run it half-baked on our own servers with all the
maintenance problems it brings.

Cheers