[Standards] POP/PEP/pubsub

[Ian Paterson]

Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> A bit of a brain dump....

Having read the whole dump, I still didn't understand what was wrong 
with using Pubsub items for things like public keys and user profiles.

Pubsub offers protocols to enable both granularity and complete data 
dumps. We will have examples of protocols that will require either one 
or the other or both.

Those protocols that don't need the whole of Pubsub won't loose anything 
from the fact that the extra functionality exists.

> So IMHO it might be more productive to think in a more particular 
> fashion about the kinds of data we store in iq:private. Some of those 
> might be amenable to PEP or pubsub. Some might not. Some might be 
> solvable in other ways.

There will be many thousands of different use cases, big and small, that 
are likely to be invented over the lifetime of the new iq:private. IMHO 
we need to offer the maximum data structure flexibility rather than try 
and tailor the solution to a few foreseeable use cases. What is sure is 
that some data will be (borrowing language from PubSub) item-atomic and 
some will be node-atomic. Some will require collections (heirarchical 
trees of nodes). Pubsub already addresses this "minimum" set of data 
structures.

As Bruce Campbell asked, do we need Pubsub to include results set 
management for cases where there are alot of items in a single node?

> At the same time, I also think it would be good to explore some 
> generic features that could be added to various protocols:
> [snip]
> These features would best be written as simple extensions that could 
> be re-used in various existing protocols.

Interesting ideas. Reuse is good. :-)

- Ian