OStatus and webfinger vs swd

[Michiel de Jong]

Hi!

There's a discussion going on about webfinger vs swd:

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/oauth/current/msg08736.html

There will be a choice between one or the other, and then the other
one will be deprecated. The discussion will take place on
apps-d...@ietf.org, and the OAuth WG already has committed to
accepting whatever outcome from it. I think OStatus should commit to
it, too.

It would be really bad if there finally were concensus about this, and
then OStatus would ruin it by not recognizing that concensus. What do
you think?

I think this is important.

Cheers!
Michiel

[elf Pavlik]

Excerpts from Michiel de Jong's message of 2012-04-13 20:27:11 +0000:

thx for bringing it to attention of various related working groups Michiel!
i forwarded it also to: public-...@w3.org

[Pelle Wessman]

I agree that the OStatus project should take a more active part in this as questions about the deployment status of the specs really is a concern for OStatus in general and some projects like StatusNet in particular: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/apps-discuss/current/msg05081.html

The recent discussion on the backwards compatibility of Pubsubhubbub 0.4 has highlighted the issues of transitioning all OStatus sites to newer non-backwards compatible specs: https://github.com/pubsubhubbub/PubSubHubbub/issues/12

Transitioning from WebFinger to SWD would probably be an even bigger challenge than transitioning from PuSH 0.3 to a new non-backwards compatible PuSH 0.4 - especially since the OStatus group as far as I'm aware still is using the pre-draft versions of WebFinger and thus it isn't as easy to transition as if one would fully support the latest WebFinger draft with the new resource query parameter and all: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/apps-discuss/current/msg05118.html

I think that the OStatus specification should be updated to better specify which versions of all specifications that it expects sites to use to make it clear that any future backwards incompatible changes to those specs, be it PuSH, WebFinger or something else, isn't part of that particular OStatus specification and that it would be up to any possible future OStatus version to define how they should be used and any transition to it.

And as I said initially - the OStatus spec should be more active in these other discussions and making the challenges in introducing breaking changes to OStatus clear to everyone involved.

/ Pelle Wessman