[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Poll on Jabber

[Per I Mathisen <per@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 28 Jun 2002, Adam Theo wrote:
> Hello, all. I've been on the list a bit promoting the Jabber instant
> messaging protocol [http://www.jabber.org] for use in FreeCiv as its
> chat system. Jabber has many advantages over even the current
> home-brewed solution, all of which I summarize below. The thread should
> have garnered enough eyeballs by now to give some awareness of Jabber
> and how it can help, so I'm now going to run a quick poll on whether you
> think Jabber should be adopted for the chat functionality of FreeCiv.

Count me as "don't know", as in "no idea". The chatline mostly needs GUI
improvement, and I am not at all sure how it should be.

But I am interested in this:

> * Directory services. Jabber currently has a simple directory and
> discovery mechanism called JUD. It would suffice for most uses and could
> be easily advanced to keep track of different FreeCiv servers, frequent
> players, and online help bots.

Is there any way we could use this stuff to authenticate Freeciv users?
That is for ranking and clan-affiliation purposes. We just need to store
and retrieve some very simple data fields for each player (== Jabber
user?) for this to work.

However, I am worried about the extra dependencies involved. As you may
know, we are rather paranoid when it comes to adding more library
dependencies to the project. Especially mandatory ones.

Yours
Per

"If the Nuremberg laws were applied today, then every
Post-War American president would have to be hanged."
 - Noam Chomsky