woes4.

Dienstag, 21. Januar 2014,

So. Another day, another entry.

This is a further point in my ongoing quest to get to the bottom of XMPP on mobile devices and why it sucks and how to make it better. This saga started here.

sending clients

I've looked at some more client software for the sending side (i.e. Linux based, not for Android).

libpurple

libpurple is the basis of pidgin, which I've already talked about in the first entry of this series. There are some other clients that use libpurple for communication, among them finch (also by the pidgin developers) or centerim.

Since libpurple neither shows the error messages described in the first entry nor supports XEP-0184 (message delivery receipts), none of the clients based on libpurple do either.

There is an unofficial plugin for XEP-0184 on the pidgin bugtracker, with no word on whether it'll ever be officially included into pidgin.

mcabber

mcabber is a console client and is, as far as I can tell, the bestest greatest coolest most awesome. It shows the error messages. It supports XEP-0184. It supports OTR. And, in contrast to some other clients, not just as a list on a webpage but this shit actually works. Wow. Mcabber is great, w00h00 .. and so forth. If you need a console client, use this one.

more servers

This time, I'm looking at "the other" xmpp daemons out there. So what have we got:

(also I'm sure I forgot some).

openfire

openfire is Java based and Open Source (Apache License). It does not support XEP-0198. There is a feature request about it on the openfire bugtracker which received attention from users but will, apparently, not be implemented soon due to manpower issues.

jabberd

jabberd does, to the best of my knowledge, not implement XEP-0198. I haven't found a clean list of "here are the standards we support", but there is a list of files with explanations that contains some XEPs but no this one. The bugtracker seems to be unreachable.

jabberd2

jabberd2 is a separate project from jabberd. They do list XEP-0198 on their "supported protocols" page but they mean version 0.3 of the XEP (see here) which is from 2007 and quite out of date and from what I know not compatible with modern implementations and didn't implement most of the features that this standard does nowadays.

metronome

metronome is a fork of prosody and claims to support XEP-0198. Since it works in prosody, I kinda assume it also works in metronome.

isode m-link

isode m-link is, apparently, commercial software and I don't know and can't test (cf "commercial") whether it supports XEP-0198 and if yes how well it does. Does anyone know? Please tell me, I'll amend this section.

UPDATE
an eagle-eyed reader (dx on #bitlbee) pointed me to a feature list on its webpage, which does include XEP-0198.