[Gossip-dev] File transfers

[Martyn Russell]

Dimitur Kirov wrote:

Hi Dimitur, thanks for the work on this! and sorry for the late reply.

> The initial work on filetransfers for gossip is attached in gnome
> bugzilla. There are some things that I want do discuss before going on.

Woohoo, I have yet to take a look, but I will do as soon as possible.

> LmBsSession is the public class. It is designed to keep track of all
> transfers among all accounts. Currently libgossip creates one instance
> of this class per account. I suggest to change this and put LmBsSession
> instance in gossip-session, so that we have one LmBsSession per program.

That makes sense to me too yes.

> LmBsClient class is used for all socket io actions. In the future it
> will be replaced by lm-socket.c , because they overlap in
> functionality. This will require extending the lm-socket class with
> some functionality for synchronous communication:
>  - callback for data_written event
>  - ability to add and remove socket watches for reading

Hmm, are you just extending the synchronous functionality here and also
have asynchronous functionality available?

> Function "lm_bs_transfer_send_success_reply" from lb-bs-transfer.c
> sends a streamhost activation reply. It could be better suited in
> libgossip, instead of loudmouth, but at the same time this will make
> LmBsSession more complicated. 

I will take a look at the patch shortly and get back to you on this.

> xep 0096 requires that clients with FT support should advertise their
> FT profile as a result of disco info request. I added the following
> features and I'm not sure if they cover everything that gossip has:
>  <feature var="http://jabber.org/protocol/disco#info"></feature>
>  <feature var="http://jabber.org/protocol/si"></feature>
>  <feature
> var="http://jabber.org/protocol/si/profile/file-transfer"></feature>
> <feature var="http://jabber.org/protocol/bytestreams"></feature>
> <feature var="http://jabber.org/protocol/muc"></feature>

Yes, we should be able to do that with little trouble. We have
protocols/jabber/gossip-disco.[ch] to handle that sort of thing, I am
not sure of the state I left it in :) it might need some work.

> Currently file transfer session ids are generated with a simple
> incremental rule GOSSIPSID1,GOSSIPSID2 .. etc. This is not good from
> security point of view, because every internet user will be able to 
> steal a file if he knows that certain user runs gossip.

OK. Actually Micke, isn't this something you changed in Loudmouth? So
the message IDs are now a generated number?

> Proxy support helps users behind masqueraded networks to send files.
> However it is a bad practice to hardcode a predefined set of proxies
> and at the same time users should not be bothered to enter FT proxy in
> gossip settings. Do you think it is worth to implement proxy support
> now, or better leave it for later versions ?

Hmm, I think perhaps it is better to implement that later so we have
something working.

> File request dialog  (ui/file_transfer.glade) looks old-fashioned. IMO
> it will be better to have this request notification in chat windows,
> similar to muc invitations. 

That's a good idea, less dialogs, etc.

> Finally, we can enable the xep-0047 support with a simple rule like:
> if file is <= 20Kb and the sender supports ibb, prefer ibb over
> bytestreams. It is not appropriate to use this method for large files,
> because user will be banned from server, due to high traffic.

Yes, this makes sense.

-- 
Regards,
Martyn