[Standards] Re: [jdev] XEP-0115: Entity Capabilities

[Mridul Muralidharan]

Joe Hildebrand wrote:
> 
> On Jul 3, 2007, at 3:04 PM, Ian Paterson wrote:
> 
>> Hmm, going forward, are the clients that most people use going to 
>> continue showing these icons? Is this a feature we need to care about? 
>> Even though I'm one of the small group of people involved in the XMPP 
>> community, I really don't care what client my contacts are using. Will 
>> there ever be mass demand for this feature? On the rare occasions 
>> where people are interested, they'll probably be perfectly happy to 
>> explicitly ask their client to find out the other user's client 
>> version on a case-by-case basis.
> 
> In general, I agree with you, but this was one of the reasons people 
> were doing version floods, which is why we came up with 115 in the first 
> place.
> 
> In specific, I have a particular use case (that I can't talk much about, 
> unfortunately) that absolutely relies the node being distinguishable.
> 
> Changing the meaning of node breaks backwards compatibility, whereas 
> nothing else in the current proposal does.  If there's no good reason to 
> break backward compatibility, I suggest that we avoid it.
> 

I am not sure what was decided as the final design for the spec 
regarding hashing, but moving from existing scheme of ver & ext also 
breaks backward compatibility.
The xep was a draft standard and there are multiple implementations 
already released - of server & client which rely on this and use these 
semantics for both documented (other xep's) and undocumented features.

Validation of caps data using hash is invaluable (esp for pep), but I am 
not very happy about breaking compatibility with existing clients and 
servers.

Regards,
Mridul