Putting the mugshot client in fedora-extras

[Owen Taylor]

On Sat, 2006-10-21 at 15:08 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-10-21 at 13:27 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > So, for a while we've been thinking about adding the client software
> > for Mugshot (http://mugshot.org) to fedora-extras. Both the client
> > and server are GPL software, so the client is definitely within the
> > scope of fedora-extras. We see various advantages to us and our users
> > from having it there:

[...]

> > *however* - updates are more of a challenge, because we're still
> > changing things rapidly and the client software is tightly coupled to
> > the server software; when we add new features, there is often both a
> > client part and a server part. 
[...]

> > Do people have other ideas about how it could work?
> 
> Add a handshake to both the server and the client for features.  The
> client says "do you support <foo>?", the server says "wtf is <foo>?",
> the client then disables it at runtime.
> 
> That way you don't have to worry about newer clients acting in weird
> ways.  Or maybe I'm missing where that would be very hard to do...

It's certainly possible to spend more effort at making new clients work
well with older servers and older clients work well with newer servers,
but it's not necessarily work we want to prioritize at the moment...
there are only four coders on the team at the moment total :-)

Just to give an example of what is involved - in the release we are
rolling out next week, we've switched the way we do notifications to the
user - from:

http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Image:Link_Swarm_Bubble_Join_Chat_or_Ignore_1.gif
 
To:


http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Image:Stacker_Browse_Window.jpg

The notifications aren't just displayed different on the client, they
are based on different elements sent from the server over XMPP: the
stacker now sends updates to a "stack" of notifications rather than just
sending individual events. So, to make the new client work with the
old server, we'd have to either try to come up with some sort of faked
up stack on the client side, or leave all the old bubble display code
around in parallel to the new code.

Plus there is the issue that the client changes may not make a lot
of sense to users until the accompanying web site design is also pushed
live.

While most updates aren't that drastic, the extra compatibility work
at each release still seems like an excessively hard way to deal with
the possibility of clients leaking out to users via yum before we are
ready.

					- Owen