Sticky Buddy Authorizations

[Etan Reisner]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 09:55:21AM +0100, Christoph Petersen wrote:
<snip>
> A new friend of mine just asked to authorize her and then
> my Pidgin disconnected. This shouldn't be a problem itself but when I
> reconnected the authorization request was gone. Maybe this is a protocol
> thing not sure about that.
>
> Is it possible to implement something like sticky authorizations? So
> that when you don't actively deny or accept a request the request will
> show up again on next login of the service in question?
>
> BR
> Christoph

That depends entirely on the protocol. XMPP servers are supposed to
repeatedly deliver subscription authorization requests until they are
either accepted or denied (the client doesn't need to do anything but log
in again to get them). I don't know whether other protocols have such a
system in place. I'm also not at all sure that all XMPP servers actually
do that correctly.

Whether pidgin can 'store' the auth request for a later answer also
depends on the protocol involved and whether the servers are willing to
accept 'unsolicited' authorization granting. XMPP was not set up to accept
this and only in one of the most recent draft versions of the
specification was support for this sort of scenario even mentioned, and
even now support for pre-emptive authorization (which is what it would be
if the server had forgotten the request was sent) is (I believe) optional.
Prior to this draft an unsolicited authorization was to be dropped
silently by the server.

    -Etan