Hi, sycamoreone wrote (22 Jan 2016 16:04:33 GMT) : > there has been some desire to replace Pidgin with some other IM client > (#8573). [...] > In order to be able to decide when/if a client is a suitable replacement > for Pidgin, it would be good to have a concrete list of requirements. I > once started to collect some in a blueprint [...]
Thanks a lot for raising this, and collecting requirements. I'd like to take a step back, since I wonder if we've defined the problem in a way that we can realistically solve it. Something on the blueprint suggests the same: "Would a pair of two separate client (XMPP and IRC) also be okay, or are we only looking for a single client that can do both?" My goal here is to *simplify* the problem to solve, and possibly to split it into smaller, more reastically solvable problems, as needed. My goal is definitely *not* to make the problem harder and discourage those who are working on it already, or would like to join the fun. I see five main instant messaging use cases that I would want Tails to support to some extent: A. Contributing to Free Software projects that use IRC chatrooms (and won't switch to anything else any time soon) B. Contributing to Free Software projects that use non-IRC chatrooms (e.g. we are switching to XMPP, not sure what else is around) C. One-to-one chat that is compatible with currently widespread practice I think that means XMPP + OTR, nowadays. D. One-to-one chat that protects metadata end-to-end (that is: "who is chatting with whom") This suggests Ricochet or similar. E. Public chatroom for Tails user support Currently, Pidgin addresses B + C, and not D. In theory it also addresses A + E, except that connecting to e.g. OFTC directly is not reliable, so a more geeky setup is needed in practice. I'm not sure what to do with the E use case. In theory we support it, and I like our current design with random nickname generation a lot, except that it does not work (reliably). This situation has been showing up repeatedly for years, and we've not made great progress to fix it, so I don't know if we can honestly say it is a MUST. To be fair, we should compare other options for E to what we _really_ have had in the last few years, not to what our current implementation would give us in an ideal world. So, for example, I think I would personally be ready to drop the "automatically generated random nickname" requirement, and ask users to create themselves a XMPP account to join a [email protected]_xmpp_server multi-user chatroom: something like that, which is well documented and works reliably, would provide better UX than a simpler option that one can't count on IMO. And then, most likely a tool that addresses B + C would also work for this use case. And then, if we find another, user-friendly and safer, way to address B + C, then I guess that it could replace Pidgin, and A can be downgraded to a geeky option, for which everyone picks their preferred tool (irssi, Pidgin, whatever) and connection setup (SSH tunnel, SSH + remote client in screen/tmux, whatever). I don't know of any tool that provides D _and_ another one among A, B and C. So for the moment, I think that D should be solved separately. Cheers! -- intrigeri _______________________________________________ Tails-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.boum.org/listinfo/tails-dev To unsubscribe from this list, send an empty email to [email protected].
