Bug#858136: ITP: bitlbee-facebook -- Facebook chat protocol plugin for BitlBee
On 18 March 2017 at 16:36, Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name> wrote:
> I believe that it is necessary to package the latest git snapshot of
> this package as older versions cannot connect to Facebook's servers.
> Despite this, I consider Facebook's protocol to be stable enough to
> include bitlbee-facebook in buster.
Hi, bitlbee-facebook dev here, the protocol is actually much more
stable than this makes it sound.
The current release (v1.0.0), from january 2016, can still connect and
basic functionality works. The only things that broke since then are
groupchat management features (create, topic, invite, kick). There are
other important bugfixes too, and I'll always recommend using the
latest version (I'll tag 1.1.0 soon), but those are not related to
server-side changes.
The last major protocol update happened in august 2015, which changed
the MQTT version string from "MQIsdp" to a custom "MQTToT" which is
still used nowadays.
The initial version of the plugin was written around january 2015,
which used that MQisdp version string, and that still works. It was
based on version 6.0 of the official android app, the current is
around 107.0.
Lots of changes since then, but the protocol is rock solid. It appears
to be designed to tolerate changes and keep backwards compatibility.
There's versioning in MQTT, sync/queue protocol, graphql queries, and
thrift helps a lot too. I really like this protocol.
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