12 Nov
2025
12 Nov
'25
3:57 a.m.
On Tue, Nov 11, 2025 at 6:57 PM Florian Schmaus <flo(a)geekplace.eu> wrote:
On 08/11/2025 16.59, Thilo Molitor wrote:
I think Philipp somewhere else in the thread brought up a valid
concern with regards to wanting to store information for people not in
the roster; However the unsupporting clients overwriting extensions is
something we can easily fix. The server needs explicit support for it
anyway. So on roster push a lack of an <extensions/> wrapper element
would mean the client either doesn’t support them or doesn’t want to
modify them. (An empty <extensions/> would indicate delete.) This
solves both non-supporting clients and avoids the traffic issue that
Florian brought up. (However in most deployments you are not
constantly editing individual roster items anyway. That’s only on add,
delete and occasional name changes).
There are potentially some overlapping problems with Bookmarks 2 but
accidental overwrite is not one of them.
All in all I’m more or less in favor of this although we should
consider what Philipp wrote wrt annotations for conversations not in
your roster.
WRT extensions synthesized by the server. We can just address this if
we feel we need that feature.
cheers
Daniel
I'm volunteering to write a XEP adding an
<extensions/> element
alongside the
<group/> element to allow arbitrary extensions for roster items.
Extending
roster items is tempting and seems like an ideal fit at first,
but there is a reason this isn't usually done (probably besides some
internal deployments):
It's fragile, inefficient, and there are better alternatives.
There is a good summary of the problems that come up in the "Bookmarks 2
extensibility" thread from Nov 2019. I'll try to come up with a link
(assuming this is still accessible somehow).
Basically, things you have to keep in mind include: you have to avoid
clients overriding unknown extensions when re-submitting things. You may
end-up with having to resubmit extensions even though you did not modify
them (which is ineffective). You may want to distinguish between
extensions that have been synthesized by the server.