[GMG-Devel] Kicking off "Kuneco": an atom and ostatus library for python

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Yo all,

So we're starting to move into federation territory.  To acheive OStatus
support, we're going to need to implement a significant number of
things.  We might as well implement them separately outside of
MediaGoblin; the more people are using OStatus, the better that is for
MediaGoblin.  As such I'm creating a new library where maybe work can be
done in:

https://gitorious.org/kuneco/kuneco

Kuneco means "togetherness" in Esperanto (thanks to Aleksej Serdjukov
for the naming suggestion).

Some things that will take enough effort to merit breaking out into a
separate library:

 - Atom support (we're currently using Werkzeug's atom support which
   is fairly inflexible.  inconexo did a rewrite of it that uses lxml
   and I offered to contribute it back, but the werkzeug authors
   thought it should be broken into a separate library (and that if it
   were they'd consider deprecating their own atom module and pointing
   to the rewrite))
 - Activitystreams support (an extension of Atom)
 - PubSubHubbub support
 - Salmon support
 - Magic signature support

I think it makes sense to include those last things with the
more-extensible atom library as it's going to have to build off of it
anyway, as far as I can tell.

Webfinger is simple enough where we can just do that inside
MediaGoblin itself but these other things are probably complex enough
to merit being split out into something else.

For the moment we're kicking off with Atom support.  Also, I wasn't sure
what license to pick, but I decided to go with modified BSD since I was
waffley, but mostly because we're actually starting out with code from a
modified-BSD-licensed codebase.  I'm not sure though, maybe Apache 2.0
is more reasonable for this because of the patent provisions.  I'm
fairly convinced however that it should be permissively licensed
though.  I strongly believe MediaGoblin being under the AGPL is the best
choice, but a library that pushes OStatus... there's well, a "network
effect" with federation (pardon the pun) and I think we'll do best for
user freedom to have as much adoption as possible.

Anyway I guess this isn't officially part of the GNU project at the
moment as it's a separate library and we haven't gone through the
process for it, but I'd like to develop it side-by-side MediaGoblin.

There's nothing in the repository yet, but that's the plan.  Thoughts?

 - cwebb