Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter covering the month of October 2021.

Many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, especially throughout the current situation, please consider to say thanks or help these projects!

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Interested in supporting the Newsletter team? Read more at the bottom.

Other than that — enjoy reading!

Newsletter translations

Translations of the XMPP Newsletter will be released here (with some delay):

• The French translation appears at jabberfr.org and linuxfr.org
• The German translation appears at anoxinon.de
• The Italian translation appears at NicFab.it

Many thanks to the translators and their work! This is a great help to spread the news! Please join them in their work or start over with another language!

XSF Announcements

• The XSF members have to elect the upcoming XSF Board and Council soon. If you are interested in running for XSF Board (business related) or XSF Council (technical related) for the 2021—2022 term, please create an appropriate Wiki page by November 7th, 2021 and link it from here

• The XSF offers fiscal hosting for XMPP projects now! Please apply via Open Collective . For more information, see the announcement blog post .

  • Moreover, the XSF has accepted its first project to the fiscal hosting program! A big welcome to the MAM Plugin for XMPP.js (note that this is unaffiliated with the upstream xmpp.js project)! They will be working on adding MAM support to xmpp.js with the eventual goal of adding it to the Matrix Bifrost bridge, allowing XMPP users to fetch history from their favorite Matrix channels. You can donate to the effort here .

• The XSF is planning to participate the Google Summer of Code 2022 (GSoC). If you are interested in participating as a student, mentor or as project in general please add your ideas and reach out to us !

• Blog and newsletter pages at xmpp.org/blog now support multiple languages. We are happy for volunteers to support translating!

Events

XMPP Office Hours - Also, checkout our new YouTube channel !

Berlin XMPP Meetup (remote) : Monthly Meeting of XMPP Enthusiasts in Berlin - always 2nd Wednesday of the month.

Videos

Sam Whited gave a talk for the XMPP Office Hours about the XSF’s new fiscal hosting service!

Guest talk at Berlin XMPP Meetup: Diving deep into Briar at the XMPP Meetup Berlin

Articles

After being featured in the September 2021 newletter with a Movim & Element web client comparison, Ade Malsasa Akbar is back with a short tutorial on how to use Audio and Video calls in these clients.

Have you heard about Bad XMPP ? Well, it is actually good - you can test your clients and servers against a set of intentionally badly configured XMPP services. Happy debugging!

The jmp.chat service blog announced some changes to the SIP inbound calling feature, so users are advised to configure it via the new interactive bot. On the iOS side Snikket is now the recommended app as some helpful functions (like calling tones) got sponsored.

Aria Network wrote a follow-up blog post on UX improvements such as avatars of the Bifrost bridge to Matrix . The previous article was “Conversion of communities to spaces, new Bifrost features” .

Software news

Clients and applications

Following last month’s Conversations and Quicksy releases of 2.10.0, a 2.10.1 point release comes with a new internal library for video compression, which allows more devices to send smaller files. Conversations will now be included in Android backups (be it Seedvault or Google’s) but only if encrypted. Furthermore, there have been address book fixes so contact addresses are picked up easier. Finally there have been fixes for notifications, which allow to start downloads properly and send MUC PMs to the right contact.

Gajim 1.3.3 has been released . This release features improved Ad-Hoc Commands and brings back spell checking. Gajim 1.3.3 includes many bug fixes and improvements. Also this month: two years of Gajim Development News! In October, Gajim’s event system received significant changes. These changes lead to improvements in notifications mainly, but also made it possible to display Jingle File Transfers directly in the chat view. Another nice addition: search filters which help narrow down your search.

Version 2.10.2 of the Snikket Android app has been released ! The main highlight of this release is the new dialpad which allows you to navigate automated call systems when using a Jingle to PSTN bridge.

New beta versions of Beagle IM and Siskin IM have been released for MacOS and iOS with support for location sharing.

Servers

The Openfire plugin for Push Notification got a small bug fix, so server admins are advised to update to the new 0.9.0 version .

Libraries

Development on mellium.im/xmpp (an XMPP library in Go) has been slower than usual this month. We’ve primarily been focused on rolling out basic pubsub, PEP, and PEP Native Bookmarks support and the basics are already merged into the main branch. For more information, see the latest Dev Communiqué .

Extensions and specifications

Developers and other standards experts from around the world collaborate on these extensions, developing new specifications for emerging practices, and refining existing ways of doing things. Proposed by anybody, the particularly successful ones end up as Final or Active - depending on their type - while others are carefully archived as Deferred. This life cycle is described in XEP-0001 , which contains the formal and canonical definitions for the types, states, and processes. Read more about the standards process . Communication around Standards and Extensions happens in the Standards Mailing List ( online archive ).

Proposed

The XEP development process starts by writing up an idea and submitting it to the XMPP Editor. Within two weeks, the Council decides whether to accept this proposal as an Experimental XEP.

• No XEPs proposed this month.

New

• No new XEPs this month.

Deferred

If an experimental XEP is not updated for more than twelve months, it will be moved off Experimental to Deferred. If there is another update, it will put the XEP back onto Experimental.

• No XEPs deferred this month.

Updated

• Version 0.8.0 of XEP-0392 (Consistent Color Generation)

  • Remove Color Vision Deficiency correction algorithms and substitute them with a better recommendation. (jsc)

• Version 0.5 of XEP-0355 (Namespace Delegation)

  • delegation of Remaining Discovery Infos
  • delegation of Bare JID Disco Items
  • Security Consideration about disco requests
  • namespace bump
  • typos (jp)

• Version 0.8.0 of XEP-0313 (Message Archive Management)

  • Update groupchat-messages-in-user-archive advice, introducing fields and disco features to make behaviour explicit in future implementations, in light of Last Call feedback. (ks)

• Version 0.4.0 of XEP-0450 (Automatic Trust Management (ATM))

  • Update to XEP-0434 version 0.6.0 and XEP-0384 version 0.8.0
  • Use Base64-encoded key identifiers in examples
  • Update TM’s namespace to urn:xmpp:tm:1
  • Update OMEMO’s namespace to urn:xmpp:omemo:2 (melvo)

• Version 0.6.0 of XEP-0434 (Trust Messages (TM))

  • Specify key identifier encoding, improve glossary and update to XEP-0384 version 0.8.0
  • Specify usage of Base64 encoding for key identifiers within trust messages
  • Specify usage of Base16 encoding for key identifiers within Trust Message URIs
  • Use Base64-encoded key identifiers in examples
  • Add ‘hash value’ as example of key identifier
  • Update OMEMO’s namespace to urn:xmpp:omemo:2
  • Update namespace to urn:xmpp:tm:1 (melvo)

• Version 0.5.0 of XEP-0401 (Ad-hoc Account Invitation Generation)

  • Factor out XEP-0445 (gl)

Last Call

Last calls are issued once everyone seems satisfied with the current XEP status. After the Council decides whether the XEP seems ready, the XMPP Editor issues a Last Call for comments. The feedback gathered during the Last Call help improving the XEP before returning it to the Council for advancement to Draft.

• XEP-0379 Pre-Authenticated Roster Subscription
• XEP-0401 Ad-hoc Account Invitation Generation
• XEP-0445 Pre-Authenticated In-Band Registration

Stable (formerly known as Draft)

Info: The XSF has decided to rename ‘Draft’ to ‘Stable’. Read more about it here.

• Version 1.0.0 of XEP-0280 (Message Carbons)
  • Advance to Stable as per Council Vote from 2021-09-29. Unbelievable. (jsc (XEP Editor))

Deprecated

• Version 1.1.0 of XEP-0411 (Bookmarks Conversion)
  • Deprecated by vote of Council on 2020-10-06. (XEP Editor (jsc))

Call for Experience

A Call For Experience - like a Last Call, is an explicit call for comments, but in this case it’s mostly directed at people who’ve implemented, and ideally deployed, the specification. The Council then votes to move it to Final.

• No Call for Experience this month.

Thanks all!

This XMPP Newsletter is produced collaboratively by the XMPP community.

Therefore many thanks to Adrien Bourmault (neox), Anoxinon e.V., Benoît Sibaud, emus, Julien Jorge, Licaon_Kter, MattJ, mdosch, Nicola Fabiano, seveso, Sam Whited, SouL, wojtek, wurstsalat3000, Ysabeau for their support and help in creation, review and translation!

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License

This newsletter is published under CC BY-SA license .

We are happy to announce the release of Smack 4.4.4. Thanks to numerous contributors this patch level release includes many fixes and improvements. I’d like to especially thank the folks from Jitsi , namely Boris Grozev, Damian Minkov, Ingo Bauersachs, and Jonathan Lennox. Who tracked down multiple bugs, including a nasty concurrency bug. Furthermore, thanks to Ingo, Smack and its important dependencies jxmpp and MiniDNS are now, again, OSGi compatible.

For a high-level overview of what’s changed in Smack 4.4.4, check out Smack’s changelog .

The shortlog for the 4.4.4 release is

flo@neo-pc ~/code/smack $ git shortlog -n --no-merges 4.4.3..4.4.4 Florian Schmaus (23):      Smack 4.4.4-SNAPSHOT      [xdata] Add missing ensureAtMostSingleValue() to parseBooleanFormField      [xdata] Safe the raw character data of form field values      [caps] Use the raw character data of form fields when caclulating the hash      [pubsub] FormNode(Provider) should not fail if there is no DataForm      [socks5] Ensure that the local SOCKS5 proxy is running (if enabled)      [core] Assert that 'event' is not END_DOCUMENT in forwardToEndTagOfDepth()      [socks5] Fix javadoc of getLocalStreamHost()      [socks5] Remove stale null check      [disco] Add DisocverInfo.nullSafeContainsFuture(DiscoverInfo, CharSequence)      [muc] Check mucServicedDiscoInfo for null in serviceSupportsStableIds()      [carbons] Remove erroneous assert statement in connectionClosed()      [muc] Check for self-presence first in presence listener      [muc] Call userHasLeft() *after* the leave presence was sent      [jingle] Add empty element optimization for <content/>      [core] Pass down the XML environment in IQChildElementXmlStringBuilder      [jingle] Mimic Manager.connection() in JingleTransportManager      [jingle] Make Jingle.Builder extend IqBuilder      [jingle] Add unit test to check that there are no redundant namespaces      [build] Remove OSS Sonatype Snapshot repository      Update NOTICE file      [resources] Rename get-contributors.sh to generate-notice-file      Smack 4.4.4Ingo Bauersachs (5):      Prevent password enforcement for SASL anonymous      Fix BOSH connection establishment      Make Smack jars OSGi bundles      Add getter for the stanza associated with the exception      Add missing stream namespace to xml declarationJonathan Lennox (2):      Update documentation of default SecurityMode.      Add removeExtension methods to StanzaBuilder.Damian Minkov (1):      [muc] Also process destory message if it contains <status/>Guus der Kinderen (1):      SMACK-908: Don't use components to count tabs in DebuggerSimon Abykov (1):      Accept an empty string as the label value

As always, this Smack release is available via Maven Central .

We would like to use this occasion to point at that Smack now ships with a NOTICE file. Please note that this adds some requirements when using Smack as per the Apache License 2.0 . The content of Smack’s NOTICE file can conveniently be retrieved using Smack.getNoticeStream() .

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This post marks two years of Gajim development news 🥳 In October, Gajim’s event system received significant changes. These changes lead to improvements in notifications mainly, but also made it possible to display Jingle File Transfers directly in the chat view! Also this month: search filters which help narrow down your search.

Changes in Gajim

Cleaning up Gajim’s internal event system offered an opportunity to rework notifications. There is a decision tree Gajim has to go through until a notification is actually issued. For example, a user might set their status to “Busy”, which should suppress showing notifications (and possibly sounds). Chats and group chats need different handling as well, because group chats can have individual notification settings, which depend on various conditions: is it a private or a public group chat, are we being mentioned by other users, etc. These decisions have been centralized at one place in order to reduce code duplication and to make notification handling easier for developers.

While simplifying Gajim’s event system, Jingle File Transfers came into focus. File transfer event processing had been spread across many places in Gajim, making it hard to migrate away from the “File Transfers” window, which is exclusively used for Jingle File Transfers. After working on this, it is now possible to have multiple widgets process events around file transfers. This means we can have a file transfer widget in the chat view as well! With the new conversation view based on a Gtk.Listbox , it was easy to add a file transfer widget for Jingle File Transfers. Similar to HTTP Upload file transfers, Jingle File Transfers (file offer, progress, success, and error) are now displayed directly in the chat view.

Thanks to first time contributor wtas , Gajim 1.4 will feature search filters! There are several filters for narrowing down your search: after: and before: for filtering by time, from: for filtering by user, and has: for filtering by content. This allows for example to search for a specific file you received some time ago. Here is what a search could look like:

after:2021-08-01 has:file

What else happened:

The service Bad XMPP offers a set of badly configured XMPP services for testing against. Running Gajim against this service uncovered an issue where Gajim’s account wizard became stuck.

Plugin updates

Both Quick Replies and Syntax Highlighting plugins have received a bug fix for an issue where inserting text into the message input failed.

With Gajim 1.4, many things have changed under the hood. These changes affect how plugins interact with Gajim or how they can access data. Starting this month, we’re adapting plugins to all the changes coming with Gajim 1.4.

Changes in python-nbxmpp

python-nbxmpp received code annotations in various places.

As always, feel free to join gajim@conference.gajim.org to discuss with us.

I’m happy to be able to announce that we’ve released version 0.9.0 of the Push Notifications plugin for Openfire!

This version does not bring new functionality. It does fix a bug that older versions of this plugin had, when running on Openfire 4.6.4 or later.

For other release announcements and news follow us on Twitter

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