ip4-address buddy property - still needed?

[Simon McVittie]

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On Fri, 26 Oct 2007 at 00:20:01 -0400, Giannis Galanis wrote:
> The feature, although not usable by the activities, it has other benefits.
> 
> By observing the buddy list, you acquire instant information of the network
> connection go the users:
> when connected to channel 1 for example:
> 169.254.x.x address are in link-local
> 172.18.x.x are connected to schoolserver

Wouldn't it be better if the information that was exposed was the
information you actually want, rather than a coincidental factoid from
which you can guess it?

"I'm connected to the mesh" vs "I'm connected via school server
foo.schools.laptop.org" vs "I'm connected to some other random access
point".

> 1. in the case of connecting to multiple jabber servers, the user should be
> able to tell which XO in the neighbout view belongs to the same school

Users should only need to connect to multiple Jabber servers if they
want multiple distinct identities (e.g. I have a personal Jabber account
and a work Jabber account). This seems an unlikely goal for OLPC.

If two users on different Jabber servers want to communicate, the way that is
done is that their servers communicate with each other (each user connects only
to their own server, which stores and forwards messages, just like e-mail).
For instance if a Google Talk user talks to a jabber.org user, a typical
message path would be something like:

example at gmail.com -> talk.google.com server -> jabber.org server -> example at jabber.org

When we add inter-server communication (#3371, currently scheduled for
1.1) that's the model we should follow, because it's how the protocol
already works. At the moment OLPC is only using a subset of the
information.

The fact that the school server is likely to be geographically close to
the user is another OLPC-specific simplification, which is not required
by the Jabber protocol. Most jhbuild instances use olpc.collabora.co.uk
as their Jabber server; this happens to be on our server in London, but as
long as you have an IP route to the Internet, it doesn't actually matter
whether you're in an Internet cafe, the MIT Media Lab, the Collabora UK
office or whatever.

The underlying Telepathy connection managers are fully aware of which server
the user is on (the part of the JID after the @); Presence Service
currently hides this, in an attempt to provide a simplified view to
activities. It would be entirely possible to expose additional
information, or for interested activities to query the Telepathy
connection manager directly.

> 2. get the geopraphical location of another user
> 
> In future versions of the neighbor view, or through other activities, the
> user should be able to filter for specific XOs according to location, or
> school(in the case he's connected to many servers). Two children in the same
> school should be able to recognize each other even if they are connected
> through a jabber server, other then the one in the school.

If what you want is geographical location, please ask for geographical
location. IP address is a poor approximation, particularly since "the"
"public IP address" may not be well-defined.

    Simon
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