[Adium-devl] Bonjour networking (It's that time again, folks!)

[Andreas Monitzer]

On Feb 17, 2007, at 16:10, Evan Schoenberg wrote:

> Bonjour as implemented in libgaim at present is separate from the  
> Jabber prpl, implementing its own subset.

That's a pretty bad design.

> Someone potentially interested in mentoring a Bonjour related  
> project (is anyone interested?  This requires being in a position  
> to both care about and test Bonjour functionality) needs to do some  
> of the legwork related to determining how we want to recommend a  
> student proceed.

Well, I would, but I'd rather be on the other side of the fence :)

> Important points that need answering:
> 1) Is the Gaim team interested in Bonjour being a sub-prpl of  
> Jabber?  This would indeed make sense.... if Bonjour works as seems  
> to be described above.

That's for Sean to answer.

> 2) However, we also need to know if this is a viable route for  
> iChat Bonjour compatibility.  Would Jabber-style messages actually  
> work?

Well, iChat doesn't implement that XEP (since Apple's implementation  
was the reason this XEP was started). However, it should be possible  
to implement it in a way that it works with both iChat and standard  
Implementations.

> 3) Can the OS X mDNS stack *be* used from this context?  Bonjour as  
> currently implemented in libgaim depends upon HOWL.  What is HOWL,  
> and how does it relate to what we already have?

Howl is dead:

http://www.porchdogsoft.com/products/howl/

They recommend switching to Apple's implementation...

IIRC (I used Howl in a mini-project about two years ago), Howl  
reimplemented Apple's API.

> 4) Is there an actual advantage to moving from our current libezv  
> based implementation to the libgaim prpl, which I believe is still  
> incomplete? Does it outweigh any disadvantages?  Is it, in fact,  
> incomplete?

Well, there's no full implementation of XMPP with all extensions  
(wouldn't make any sense, since some are outdated and some are  
special purpose XEPs). The question is only, what subset was  
implemented.
As far as I know, libezv only implementes the absolute minimum.  
Adding more to it would only benefit bonjour chatting. Having both  
under one hood is much better from the code reuse point.
Imagine: vv, file transfer, etc, everything for free for Bonjour,  
because Sean (or some SoC student) already implemented and tested it  
for XMPP.

andy