On Sat, 9 Jun 2007, Justin Karneges wrote:
I question the purpose of distributing a single MUC room across many public XMPP servers. You're right, we should probably look to IRC if we want tips on how to do that, but why do we want this at all? I thought the only reason individual IRC rooms were distributed was simply a side-effect of the fact that every IRC server must host every room. All ten thousand rooms of some IRC network are each hosted by every IRC server within that network.
Flaw in the 'standard' IRC protocol. There are probably varients that do the smart thing and only distribute IRC rooms (#channels) to servers that have users using that room on that host, or are hubs for such servers. IMO, any distributed MUC approach should take the same tactic to reduce bandwidth costs.
Peter mentions distributed MUC being useful in a tactical environment. Wouldn't it be enough to just use a good, distributed XMPP server deployment, that also supports distributed MUC internally?
Interoperability is preferred.
The proposed XEP would allow for distributed MUC nodes to be external, owned/operated by different people, and potentially running different implementations. Sure, standards are good, and this is exactly the kind of spec we'd promote if it were needed. I'm just not convinced anyone needs it. Who will implement it? It is expected that general IM clients should support it? (this is my concern)
On reading it, it appears that the only client side support required is understanding the <redirect/> response to joining a room. For clients that don't grok that, the invite from the peer host is within the existing MUC protocol.
Having the client retain knowledge of the various peerhosts (with the aim of resending a message to one of them if its chosen peerhost is MIA) is probably overkill.
I hope that we are not trying to clone IRC's behavior just for the sake of saying we can.
Much of IRC's quirks come from the server to server protocol, and the design being based around a star configuration. Mesh-based designs are more resilient.
-- Bruce Campbell. [1] He says, having suggested a new client protocol for private chats.
