[OTR-dev] Re: Requirements for libotr4

Ian Goldberg ian at cypherpunks.ca
Thu Jun 19 15:14:30 EDT 2008


On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 03:04:15PM +0000, Uli M wrote:
> On 2008-06-19, Kjell Braden <fnord at pentabarf.de> wrote:
> -snip-
> >> 5. "?OTR?" restarts OTR. Again a hardcoded string I would like to see
> >> disappear. Because of it, it is impossible to transfer OTR
> >> conversations over OTR...and also complicated to talk about OTR in an
> >> OTR session...I always find myself writing "if you wanna restart OTR
> >> write <question mark>OTR....". A function otr_restart would be the
> >> right thing here I believe.
> >
> > This will probably complicated: we need something that the lib can use
> > to identify it's messages, and since we don't know what kind of protocol
> > will be used, it's hard to find some sort of tag that
> >   a.) is protocol independent (an additional stanza in XMPP will not
> > work on OSCAR/IRC/whatever)
> >   b.) will never interfere with messages manually written by the user
> 
> As far as I can tell ?OTR? is used for two different things:
> 
> 1. OTR initiation. I agree that you need something like ?OTR? here.

Definitely.

> 2. OTR restart. Here ?OTR? is interpreted within an ongoing OTR conversation
> which I think is totally unneccessary. Here you could easily use a
> protocol internal message to restart OTR. That way anything can be
> transmitted over OTR, including OTR. One would only have to add a
> function otr_restart() to the library.

The latter is already there (it's what pidgin-otr does when you click
"Refresh private conversation" for example).

The reason libotr treats a typed "?OTR?" as an signal to start/refresh
the private conversation is that for some clients (iChat?) that may be
the only way to do it.  There may be no UI in the client itself to
control OTR.

But I suppose we could make it an option.  If you've got OTR support in
your UI, let libotr know that, and it will treat a typed "?OTR?" just as
any other 5 chars.  [And maybe an option to treat "?OTR?" as the
start-OTR command if you're not currently encrypted, but as regular text
if you are, hmm.]

   - Ian



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