[Twisted-Python] Words.Participant capabilities

Kevin Turner acapnotic at twistedmatrix.com
Mon Feb 11 00:06:45 EST 2002


So, I was looking at doing /whois for words.ircservice, and found that
lots of accessors weren't available, and there may be a bunch of
questions as to whether they should be.

One central question is "Do queries about a participant get answered by
the server, or by the participant's client?"  Having the server answer
the questions is faster and cuts down on traffic, particularly if it's a
question that everyone is frequently going to be asking about everyone
else.  But letting the client provide the answers gives the client more
freedom to protect their privacy by refusing to answer, or lying, etc. 
("No...  she's not home.  Really.  You just missed her.  No, that's not
her voice in the background, that's just the TV.")

More specific points:

There's no way for a Words client to determine the online status of
another Participant without adding that person to their contact list. 
Should there be?  Almost definately.  Unless for some reason you *want*
them to have to go through the hurdle of getting you added to their
contact list.

More user information.  Should a Words client be able to look up another
Participant and maybe find out what their Identity is, and maybe get a
few bits of meta-data out of that?  Anything from a single IRCNAME-style
string to a contact-manager VCard.

Server descriptions.  The best I've seen is something like
self.service.serviceName, which in practice always yields
"twisted.words".  How can we get something more descriptive, like "The
Official Words Service Of The 2002 Olympics" or
"pb://192.168.0.2/twisted.words/"?

When we get inter-server connections going, do we want to disclose which
server a participant initially signed on to?  Do we want to disclose the
internet address of the participant's client?

Away messages and idle times.  Words doesn't have these.  Should it?

That's all for now,

 - Kevin, 
   (who is still NOT wasting coding time on IRC servers.)

-- 
The moon is new, 1.9% illuminated, 28.2 days old.





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