[Twisted-Python] Words.Participant capabilities

[Christopher Armstrong]

Some quick notes. They're really ideas and opinions, even though it
sounds like I'm telling you what to do. :D

On Mon, 2002-02-11 at 00:06, Kevin Turner wrote:
> One central question is "Do queries about a participant get answered by
> the server, or by the participant's client?"

Let the server handle user-status queries, but let the client tell the
server how to respond to them.

> 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.

Let the user-who-is-being-queried specify how they want this to be
answered.

> 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.

Again, let the client specify.

OK, I'm noticing a pattern here. This "capabilities" issue has been
popping up a *lot* recently, so maybe some sort of generalized
"capability system" might crop up out of this (ie, a way to grant or
deny capabilities between perspectives (or identities?)). something to
think about.

> 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/"?

I'm not sure where you're going with this point, but I get an odd
pleasure out of seeing "pb://". 

> 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?

I *definitely* don't want to allow clients to get IPs of other clients
without explicit consent. After living on dalnet for a few years, where
kiddies DDoS you for looking at them the wrong way, I've been locked
into this opinion. And the server thing - I don't see any harm, but why
does it matter? (that is, if you can think of a reason to do it, I don't
think there's any problem with doing it)

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

Yeah.

> That's all for now,

So yeah, unless there's some reason to give access to information about
a user/server other than "because it's in /whois", then I don't really
see the point.

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

We believe you. Keep up the good work on hacking not-IRC, anyhow. :-D

-- 
                                Chris Armstrong
                         << radix at twistedmatrix.com >>
                http://twistedmatrix.com/users/carmstro.twistd/