Feedback on XEP-0379, XEP-0401, XEP-0445

Hi,

I’m sorry to say but the "Easy Onboarding" stack is a bit of a mess
and I believe it requires significant work before we can consider
restarting the Last Call.

Personally the most impactful feature of that stack has always been
allowing registrations on servers that don’t have public (open)
registrations. This solves a real need for "Family and Friends" style
servers that really, really should not have open registration.

I was never fully sold on the pre-authenticated roster part of the
stack. I don’t know. I guess it’s kinda neat but I don’t really need a
mutual presence subscription to get the first message out.

The XEPs try to separate those two concerns (I guess partially due to
me providing the same feedback a few years ago) but do a pretty bad
job at it.

0445 is technically a separate XEP but without 0401 I have no
(standardized) way retrieving those registration tokens.

However 0401 doesn’t provide a guarantee that the server even supports
0445 and I have no way of knowing that before retrieving the invite
URI. Only after retrieving the invite URI and checking for the
existence of the ibr=y parameter I know that the server supports 0445.

Currently, when I want to display a button in my client that reads.
"Invite people to my server" I can’t because i have no discovery for
that.

Side note: The XEP is kinda sneaky in that it uses the same "preauth"
parameter for 0379 and 0445. So even if I as a client developer are
only really interested in the registration part; the delta work to
also implement 0379 is extremely minimal. (Which I guess that’s fine
and very much on purpose; but it speaks to the separation between
those three XEPs not really existing).

With an implementor hat but I guess also partially with my council hat
I really need these 3 XEPs to go one of two ways:

a) Give me a real way to use 0445 stand alone. Give me a standardized,
discoverable way to request those IBR tokens from my server.

b) Collapse those three XEPs back into one and make 0445 a required
part of the stack. (Basically guarantee me that the URI that falls out
of 0401 also allows me to register on the server of the person that
invited me)



P.S.: Completely separate of concerns above: We (both Prosody and
ejabberd) do that have started to put a Link: <xmpp:…> header into the
HTTP landing page. This allows a client to HEAD the HTTP endpoint when
scanned from a QR code and then process the xmpp URI directly and
internally without opening a website first. That way you can always
put the HTTP uri into a QR code and when scanned it will always do the
right thing regardless of whether it was scanned by the OS or by the
XMPP app directly. I think this should go into the XEP.
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