 okay then let's start I made a wiki page these days for this bof and let's look what questions are okay first thing we had an ad hoc bof last year at Debcon Memorial it was just by accident because I wear a hoodie which said XMPP and then people approached me are you involved into something with HMPP and I said well not so much but okay there was some interested in bof and quite a lot of people came and there were some some ideas what can be made better in XMPP related packages in Debian and also we talked about the infrastructure of Debian itself our own XMPP server okay I try to summarize a little bit about what I know what happened since last year and I probably do not know everything so just tell me what I do not know what happened there were major releases of for example the XMPP server prosody from 09 to 010 and this is already in Debian and already also in stable backpots so whoever likes to run prosody you can have the latest and greatest version on both buster and stretch each ability has also been updated major release to 1804 it was so also a major release and also there was a major release of the client Gatlin which is quite important release because it does now use Python 3 instead of Python 2 GTK 3 instead of GTK 2 and all this stuff so very important for the future when GTK 2 and Python 2 will get removed at some time also packages like MacCabre and profanity have been upgraded I think both of them didn't make it into the stretch release because of bugs and also there's a completely new client called Dino and Debian it's Dino I am because there was a different program Dino before long ago but it's still Debian is an eternal database if a package exist at one point in time it is very difficult to ever have a different package with the same name it happened but then you need a long time until it's gone from all the old old old old archives and so on okay what also happened is there is now an XMPP team thanks to salsa there is the XMPP team on salsa and most known most not but many XMPP related packages are now in the XMPP team prosody, Gatlin, Dino, C+, profanity MacCabre and a lot of other stuff so whoever does some packaging work inside of Debian related to XMPP think about moving your package to the team so more people can help fixing bugs and you can help the others okay that's what I know anybody else who knows anything about any progress of any or not progress of any packages since last year or whatever at that point I like to know who of you uses XMPP as a end user so for chatting for example so most which clients are your preferred clients both on Debian and also not on Debian let's say on a mobile phone or wherever you use it maybe we can okay you didn't use XMPP right you you which client are you using no for the XMPP I know okay not okay okay well on iOS yes okay okay I okay let's let's end and then I repeat what Pitchin on laptops I use Pitchin or profanity on the phones conversations okay so I try to summarize most use Pitchin, Gatlin, one Dino and on on phones Xether and conversations and on iPhone tzatziki okay then next question would be is there anything in the context of Debian which should be done regarding the client side so is is there anything missing or any ideas we can improve not from upstream but from Debian I know that all XMPP clients are horrible but this is a thing of the upstream developers I would say Dino is a big step Dino for usability for usability yeah that's true unfortunately Dino has very very few contributors and I see one commit per week or less so it does not improve so fast that it should I hope it gets better because yeah it's really nice looking but feature-wise it's far behind all the others on tech no tech friends and family yeah yeah yes absolutely for non-technical people it's really nice it looks like conversations only on on the PC server-wise who of you does run an XMPP server and and are you using Debian packages or prosody or e-travel e-travel e good choice prosody and I didn't realize there was a back port of upstream so yeah yeah you can run 0.10 yeah so as of today I actually switched to back ports yeah yeah it's a huge progress from 0.9 to 0.10 so you should use back ports and you I'm also running prosody also the back port yeah the back port yeah I'm also running prosody back port with the back ports in my company so it's more or less internal server for the company and Debian also runs prosody with back ports I am this huge progress since last year Fogler.debian.org is our server for RTC and XMPP voice over IP has been upgraded to stretch and uses now prosody back ports and prosody modules back ports so still many people say e-travel e is still better so probably it is I and in fact I think about changing from prosody to e-travel e at my company okay is there anything about the server stuff it's only three people who could command we should do something better as Debian I think if we managed to have always the latest or best version packaged in the same way as for the clients then it's all we can do. I think currently this is a case so what what I see from prosody each other and also from at least some of the clients it looks it looks like the best distribution could do even back ports to the stable version still I I get always questions about gut trim for for Tracy and people want the latest gut trim on older Ubuntu versions or older Mint versions and there's not so much I can do as a Debian maintainer I almost do not have any contact to Ubuntu and less so to Mint it's I do not even know how to how to work with the people it's more thing how Debian works with downstreams and so on and nothing related to XMPP okay now Debian infrastructure who of you uses the Debian XMPP server which is anyway limited to X to Debian developers Debian maintainers no probably not Debian maintainers do not have a DO address right so they can't use it okay so who is a Debian developer and uses XMPP service at least once in a while you have your own I'm using it last year there was many complaints about spam it was and it was really really horrible and everybody in the room who used the service of Debian said I get 10 20 messages every day in Russian or sometimes combined Russian English that was really horrible it dropped significantly we changed to stretch in fact to use a firewall but we never managed to install the firewall it still dropped so we are I ask around why it dropped and some theories about it but nobody knows exactly why it dropped might be that the spammers found out that XMPP is a dead technology and it isn't worth to send spam to XMPP users I don't know also there was this XMPP spam fighting manifest did you hear about it if you search for it on the internet it's by one of the XMPP gurus the one who does the Android Yaksim client Georg something and he wrote a manifest how administrators of XMPP servers should prevent spammers for example limiting the number of accounts you can create per second and other things maybe some administrative implemented ideas of him I don't know anybody knows about this issue and why it dropped or maybe it does not drop in general I never got spam although so I don't know if lucky you this comes from or you got so much spam on all that you know addresses last year and there were a lot of people who said I never want again use my XMPP I used the Debbie and all cadres for some time then I switched off I switched it now on but no spam I I think the spam comes mostly when when you travel use ID is an email address that is published somewhere so they just looking for email addresses my private Java ID is also my email address so it's circulating around anyway and they specifically I think try to spam anything that looks like an email address or looks like a Java ID which has the same syntax so that's mostly likely why the TVN org Java ID is also got so much spam yeah but that would be the same for me with the debut address email address equals chapter address so this is rather strange that some developers got all that stuff and I was for some reason exclude yeah now it dropped totally I get maybe one to invitation spans per week which is okay I just ignore them so not direct messages anymore but contact requests that are spam anyway because I see that the sender is nobody I would know and and also the the message is neutral so it's not oh we met at that conf let's have a contact no it's always yeah the user wishes to contact you okay go away or normally I like if people requesting contact if they write one or two personal words so that I know okay this might be someone I would like to have contact to let's talk about bug number something okay or you are lazy maintainer then I know okay the person really knows me okay that's mainly what what I noted in the wiki so there's not so many things to talk this year much less than last year good well any anybody likes to address anything related to XMPP and so I'm not using XMPP at all at the moment I do know IRC I'm using IRC sometime and maybe you could quickly explain the difference between IRC and XMPP yeah anybody knows that I think the the most interesting I'm not an expert but for me it looks like they managed not to to use this omimo which works like like the signal it's more or less an implication of this protocol and this improves on a lot of drawbacks which I also saw for the of the record messaging and yeah you can go offline exactly exactly the device must not be available when you send the message no oh and so this I think convert conversations is pretty good in that so I had no problem so far there are especially for conversations and the other lot of in other implication other clients don't have this implemented yet gatcham is the other one for desktop which is most advanced yes but I know is it is it already available yeah okay okay I'm the maintainer of both and I'm a maintainer of both gatcham and dino and I always test omimo if I by using the two clients okay with my own accounts I never tested it myself but I from time to time I followed a conversation like group chat where they discuss about clients and stuff and this is sometimes interesting and they were kind of suspicious about the status of dino but I think this is really which makes it kind of there is missing a client for iOS which really is better than secure yeah which works flawlessly or jet secure must be improved but if you I use it with my my family my brothers and their families and my parents and of course this is mostly on the same server but it really works pretty well so it's really I would almost say competitive competitive to what is the name what's up I use XMPP also with my girlfriend I forced her to and she would not use it otherwise but yeah she uses conversations on Android and she sends me photos of our cats and I'm not here it's okay yeah it works like what's up yeah there is not a dedicated client with the right user interface like slack the technology would allow it but yeah this is a big problem with XMPP all clients are problematic but if someone would write a slack like client it would be possible based on the technology I have to say both ISC and XMPP are very old I think ISC is now 26 years old or more 19 yeah it's now 19 20 years old and ISC is even six seven years older so both are very old what you get with XMPP is an ID you log in into the server with your ID and your password and that's you and with with ISC there are nicknames then there's Nick serve as a workaround but yeah ISC is different in this respect so for example that in theory spam fighting is easy with XMPP because you have a verified ID it's not like email for example I cannot send you an XMPP message with a faked sender it's it's only if I'm the admin of the server but then it would be possible but not and if it's only more encrypted than that so so it's it's it's even better than email in this respect while ISC is worse than email in this respect I would say yes yes yes this is what the prosody spam filter module can do you can you can block complete servers you can block IDs which does not make sense for spammers because I change IDs all of the time but for example what is really nice in XMPP you have the roster so contact list and a spam filter can easily say okay everything that is by a contact is white listed which makes it possible to be a little bit more aggressive with the rest of the spam filter and with email that's it's not possible because you never know whether the sender is real and even if you say yeah this sender is white listed it doesn't make sense it with XMPP it's possible you can whitelist me and but I'm not an expert on XMPP neither I'm a Peketra mostly and only if you have the admin of the server because the server address is verified by by the receiving server so if if you I don't know what your server name is something dot AT and my server receives this then it looks as is from the server something dot AT and then yeah then it can be fake because we have the admin of your server but only the dritz of yeah of your server so as far as I know I'm not an expert on that but that's what I heard so it's a little bit better verified than email and much better than IRC DNS probably reverse DNS yeah I don't believe that's a cryptography because then it would make things more complicated because then you have to implement a trust mechanism before and that does not exist to my knowledge and I think it works that you usually you allow your XMPP server only to federate with with other servers which have a certificate SSL's are said certificate and that's also and and this is common in the XMPP world but it's not common in the in the email world because you always have to be be able to if someone even if an email server doesn't have a certificate you have you need to accept mail from the server so they from the beginning they more or less decided that we that they all want to have or demand this SSL connection and the certificate and so there is it's more effort to get into that system in fact when Google still had significant XMPP usage I had to still whitelist the Google server because they did not use SSL but because I do not know anybody who still uses XMPP with Google and I'm not even sure whether it works anymore I turn it off I removed long ago the whitelist entry for Google anyway so I allow only SSL server connections and in fact only SSL client connections as well wants to use my server without SSL has just bad luck I do not care for them I probably everybody has configured their server that way right it's very common in XMPP now that SSL is a must anybody else one so XMPP can't be a slack alternative but the XMPP technology itself has been used to develop a lot of messaging plans the most famous ones are is WhatsApp you could still find the for the messages or emails of the founders of WhatsApp on the XMPP mailing list if you could search for a few years back you will still find there also conversations and there's this CONTOQ is also another XMPP messaging plan so CONTOQ you won't with CONTOQ you will feel like it's just like signal WhatsApp but one day we are a friend of mine and I actually did conversations to CONTOQ chat and it worked CONTOQ uses phone numbers the conversations is usually the XMPP that we do but we still managed to get send messages between both of them we just needed to figure out if I'm giving the phone number what is the user name and password it is creating on the server so things that could be developed one thing that is funny I was at mini-deb conf in Hamburg and there was a sprint by a number of people they like to bring MOVIM to Debian it's written in PHP so I could really not help at all because I do not know any PHP and yeah but MOVIM is a XMPP client that runs on the web but as a server so you need to trust it your for example grid and password so best you run it your own but it's that web interface and it's more like a social network so it is a little bit like whatever Facebook or whatever social network so it has group it has groups and you can follow other people and you can also chat and group chat but it's all based on PHP on XMPP and you can combine it with all other XMPP clients and so on and they even have funny features from the social network world for example if you ever heard from younger people maybe the word stickers and stickers are like little images you can send around and in MOVIM you have even stickers so you click there and then you have a number of cats and pigments and so on and princesses and everything and then you send it and it's also this sticker implementation is based on the XMPP standard so it mainly sends the hash of the sticker image to the client the client looks whether it already knows this hash and then it just shows the right sticker and if it does not yet know the hash then it requests the sticker from the other side and so it's like so it's quite different from sending photos because in photos they are probably unique so it doesn't make sense to to have a hash mechanism but stickers are sent again and again so it makes a lot of sense to cave them so they have these other mechanism and XMPP but so far only very few XMPP clients do support stickers in fact I do not know any other than MOVIM so let's hope that MOVIM also gets into Debian unfortunately I do not know the state of affairs so what was nice at the MiniDebConf in Hamburg there was even the uptrend developer of MOVIM it's mainly one person or one and a half but the complete one person he was at MiniDebConf which was very nice I believe he is not even a Debian user but he came specifically for the sprint to the DebConf which I found very nice there's another social network based on XMPP it's called Salutatoire and it's already in Debian but there is now a new version upcoming and I hope we get it also into Debian but there are some dependencies we have to track and so on so don't hold your breath again like all good software it's made by a single person who does it in his spare time after work so both MOVIM and Salutatoire are the cool thing MOVIM and Salutatoire are two social networks both based on XMPP and there are a lot of things that are completely compatible so user of Salutatoire can send messages and I do a lot of stuff with MOVIM users this is really nice let's hope both will be in Debian by Buster that's from my side the Dino IAM package is linking to the Dino package in the tracker ah then I forgot the IAM have your account on the wiki then you can just fix it okay yeah the Dino was a music program or something right yeah midi midi tracker yeah just fix it it's a wiki okay anything else so then let's see what we have what updates on this issue of things we have next year in Kory Tiva we have a Debian XMPP room no this is a good question that's something yeah good that you reminds me on the on the Debian XMPP server so far there is one room but only for the admins so they're typically only Victor and Victor and Victor and maybe sometimes me and maybe Daniel Pocock but we could create more rooms and we can also think about allowing at least Debian developers to create rooms and then other people who are not Debian developers can join the rooms of course that would be a nice addition we just have to enable it in the configuration and yeah at least Debian developers should be able to create rooms on the other hand Debian uses mainly IRC and if we start to use XMPP for rooms it would exclude the users of IRC which I would find not so nice on the other hand if you use IRC it's easy for XMPP users to join IRC channels because our gateways I use Bbumi for example so we can activate this feature with the rooms but it would be nice if it if you do not forget please about the IRC users we have pages where we list all the Debian house channels yeah we could similarly have a page for listing all the Debian XMPP rooms and regarding missing out on conversations between the two IRC or XMPP we could create bridges yeah okay so it's like not for Debian but for a lot of other communities that I'm in we have bridges for IRC matrix and Telegram and people can choose to join from anywhere and they still get messages this is great so something something between XMPP and IRC could be easily done yeah there is one bridge that is in Debian and which is very nice it's called Bbumi does anybody use Bbumi or heard about it Bbumi is mainly a bridge from an XMPP server to IRC so for example I join IRC channels by means of Bbumi so I use my company XMPP server or another one that features Bbumi the Debian org server does not yet have Bbumi so I cannot use that address and then I go in IRC channels and it works relatively well relatively sometimes glitches but it's okay and some people even preferred over direct IRC so I can talk to Daniel and Victor also maintaining the Debian server that we install and activate Bbumi on the Debian org server and you can use your XMPP the over address to join IRC I'm hungry let's go to lunch 15 minutes dinner dinner in Europe it's lunch time now I was trying to trying to recreate any kinds of wheels in rust and maybe if anyone have something else idea of XMPP now maybe I'll try to return I will try to write a XMPP library in rust okay that's already one yeah no by a link French guy and well when XMPP when I say something it's always a French guy it's very French XMPP RS it's called do you know this yeah call it but I know that but actually I check his github page and it's like they only have support one only one of their stand well only one for their standards as the others are still in the wish list so maybe I should contribute a little close to me just send some poor request or something else yeah maybe you can talk to him directly he's always on XMPP and as far as I know he currently does not have a drop deliberately he quit the job to have more time for free software as far as I heard and to to blame or the wheeling I think it was and I just contact him and I think he loves any contribution so he's very nice person and I think any contribution is very welcome or any cooperation or whatever and because yeah there's still no real good rust software for XMPP and it's something that is really needed maybe I'll contact him I mean her or him contact him maybe next time or maybe later he's an art linux user but he was at last that conflict more real it's better me because I didn't I didn't even contribute any kind of package for any kind any in the institution nice very nice so so it's fun to work with him I believe also he knows a lot about XMPP so this is very nice I sometimes ask him some stuff any questions in the ISE no no and the ISE there were no questions right okay okay thanks thanks to video team