Google Talk doesn't implement jabber:iq:privacy, and instead they have decided to add some simple extensions to their roster for various stuff which I don't care about, but also including blocking and unblocking people.
When the Google Talk client signs in, something like this is sent to request the roster: <iq type="get" id=...> <query xmlns="jabber:iq:roster" xmlns:gr="google:roster" gr:ext="2" .../> </iq> And the roster comes back with some extra gr: stuff: <iq type="result" id=...> <query xmlns="jabber:iq:roster" xlmns:gr="google:roster" gr:ext="2" ...> <item jid="[EMAIL PROTECTED]" gr:w="4" gr:mc="23" .../> <item jid="[EMAIL PROTECTED]" gr:t="B" gr:w="3" gr:mc= .../> </query> </iq> I don't know or care what gr:w or gr:mc are, but gr:t is set to "B" on a blocked contact, and unset when the contact is unblocked, and we'd really like to be able to offer block/unblock functionality when we're on a Google Talk server. Now, the problem with this is that Google Talk doesn't implement service discovery either, so we can't get a set of <feature var="yada"/> from their server. My first idea of just looking to see if these gr: things are set on the roster items does not work if the roster is empty. In this case, I've got no idea whether the Google roster extensions are implemented and I should hence offer blocking functionality to the user. Some servers such as jabberd will just return all of the extra xmlns:gr stuff to us in the result, like: <iq type="result" id=...> <query xmlns="jabber:iq:roster" xlmns:gr="google:roster" gr:ext="2" .../> </iq> Whereas other servers like jabberd2 strip off all of the unknown xmlns: <iq type="result" id=...> <query xmlns="jabber:iq:roster" /> </iq> So, the only way I can think of to detect whether the google:roster is supported, if the roster is empty, is to set some nonsense in that namespace in my roster request: <iq type="get" id=...> <query xmlns="jabber:iq:roster" xmlns:gr="google:roster" gr:ext="2" gr:hack="Dear Google, Please implement service discovery, Love Rob" .../> </iq> In this case, Google's server removes the invalid nonsense in its reply, so I can distinguish it from the previous two cases. But this is horrific... Ignoring the merits of Google's decision to implement blocking using a non-standard extension like this, can anyone think of a better way to discover support for their extension? Or is anyone here from Google and would like to implement service discovery? Something like this: <iq type="result" id=...> <query xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/disco#info";> <feature var="google:roster" /> </query> </iq> Would be great... Regards, Rob
