Subject: [Wocky] username vs. [email-masked]

From: Greg Hudson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 13:30:52 -0500

As we all know, one of our big usability issues with Jabber is that
users commonly enter just a username into the buddy list and expect it
to work like [email-masked] would.

I have discouraging news on this front.  A Jabber JID looks like:

      jid             = [ node "@" ] domain [ "/" resource ]

That is, while "[email-masked]" is the most common expected form of
a JID, just plain old "mit.edu" is valid as well--but it is treated as
a domain, not as a username.  It's apparently common to write Jabber
messages to things like "mit.edu/announce/online" to get certain
automated behavior from the Jabber server.

I initially thought this was not a big deal, because the spec required
domains to contain a "." (or at least a ":" for IPv6 literal
addresses) and most username do not, but apparently that's a mistake,
not an intended restriction, and it's common in practice for people to
send messages to "myserver/announce/online" without a dot in the
domain name.

The upshot is that Gaim developers are unwilling to accept a patch
translating username into username@defaultdomain because it would be
munging valid JIDs.  The mail thread is at
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=8988122&forum_id=9587
although the archive appears to be a little bit behind.

It's too bad that Jabber's no-username form of a jid isn't
@domain[/resource]; then there would be no ambiguity.  But we can't go
back in time and change that.

I will still look into a server-side hack to make this behavior work.
But we won't ever get a clean solution without an incompatible change
to XMPP.

---

From: Joanne Hallisey <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:56:21 -0500

This is something that we should gauge user response to.  If it is  
not a big deal to them, maybe you can wait.

Joanne Hallisey
Sr. Project Manager
Information Services and Technology
W92-153
617-253-1894
[email-masked]

On Nov 17, 2005, at 1:30 PM, Greg Hudson wrote:

> _______________________________________________
> Wocky mailing list
> [email-masked]
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/wocky

---

From: Greg Hudson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 16:06:34 -0500

> not a big deal to them, maybe you can wait.

Perhaps.  It's looking like we'll have to leave this one alone,
disappointing as that is.

I looked into a server-side hack for this, but it turns out to be harder
than I had hoped.  Jabberd 2 uses magic domain names like "c2s" and "sm"
for communication between server components.  So if I change it to parse
all bare-word JIDs as [email-masked], I interfere with that, and the
server stops working.  Trying to change the JID more selectively (in
message, presence, and roster requests received by c2s) looks to be
difficult due to jabberd's architecture.

I don't think Paul's compromise would convince the Gaim developers.
Most of them are looking to reduce the number of configuration options
in Gaim, not add to them.