The XMPP Newsletter July 2021

 Posted on August 5, 2021 |  8 minutes |  Newsletter |  emus

Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter covering the month of July 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):

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 Announcement

Currently, the XSF members are voting on new members and reapplying members. The member meeting will be hold on August 19th 2021, 19:00 UTC to formally approve the voting results. XSF group chat (MUC) If you are interested to joining the XSF you can apply beginning of Q4 2021, too!

Since this month a new sub-domain is also available at xmpp.net: data.xmpp.net. Many thanks to MattJ! The first data project being hosted here for everyones access are the providers lists (JSON format) from the XMPP Providers project. There are already first client implementation using these - please review the criteria and add you service as well via the Gitlab repository! Feedback welcome!

Events

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

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

Videos

XMPP Office Hours: Building a Chat Bot on Ad Hoc Commands

Articles

With the very first article we would like to bring attention to a general serious topic: Burnout in open-source communities. Please take care of yourself, seek help and also have an eye even on your virtual colleagues! Searching for help in your current location may be more satisfying, however this could be a start:

The Debian XMPP Team blog announced all the goodies the soon to be released Debian 11 will bring. While these might not be ’new’ for newsletter readers, they’ll improve the experience for users of Debian Stable significantly.

Seth Kenlon, from Red Hat, published two articles on the XML markup language (a quite important thing in the XMPP world ;) ) at opensource.com. Starting with What is XML? and following up by Use XMLStarlet to parse XML in the Linux terminal.

Software news

Clients and applications

Gajim News: Development on the new Gajim version continued in July, bringing many fixes and improvements. Also this month: WebSocket improvements and a new python-nbxmpp release.

Profanity 0.11.0 is out, bringing six months of polishing to 0.10.0. This includes message archive management (MAM) support (still experimental), support for changing the password, abilities in group chats (MUC) like voice and registration, OMEMO trust mode, private messages (MUC-PM) in public channels, spam reporting, server contact discovery, and much more.

Jan-Philipp Litza built an XMPP feed integration for the German official warning app NINA: Find the Github repository here. One can simply add the bot and register coordinates of interest. May it never contact you!

UWPX v.0.34.0.0 has been released. This release mostly focuses on bug fixes for the first beta release of UWPX with an ETA of 01.09.2021 and proper push support even if the app is not running. For this COM8 has been working on its C++ push server for the last couple of months and it is finally up and running. Besides that, this release also includes XEP-0085 (Chat State Notifications) improvements with a proper typing indicator and status messages.

Servers

ejabberd 21.07 has been released with a plethora of fixes and improvements, so be sure to read the changelog if you’re using shared groups and MySQL. Big changes have been implemented pertaining to the build system, as ejabberd can now be built using rebar3 and Elixir Mix.

For OpenFire an update for the plugin ‘inVerse’ has been published and it makes the Converse.js web client available for its users.

Libraries

python-nbxmpp 2.0.3 has been released.

Mellium Dev Communiqué: Development continued apace this month and included the usual assortment of bug fixes and improvements. In addition, carbons, MUC, and Roster Versioning were all implemented!

Smack, a Java XMPP client library has been released in version 4.4.3 with mostly bugfixes.

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.

  • Disco Feature Attachment

    • This specification provides a way to indicate that a feature is implemented for a specific namespace

  • Pubsub Caching Hints

    • This specification provides a way to get caching information from a Pubsub node

New

  • No new XEP 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.

Updated

  • Version 1.0.0 of XEP-0429 (Special Interests Group End to End Encryption)

    • Accepted by Council (XEP Editor: jsc)

  • Version 0.2 of XEP-0413 (Order-By)

    • Add a way to discover on which protocols Order-By applies
    • Remove references to SQL (except in implementation notes)
    • Specify that order-by operate on the whole item set and inside a RSM result set
    • Explicitly says that creation and modification dates are set by Pubsub service itself
    • Specify that Clark notation should be used for extensions
    • Add a full example with Pubsub and RSM
    • Add hint for SQL based implementations removed XEP-0060 and XEP-0313 as dependencies, they are mentioned as use cases, but are not mandatory
    • Better wording following feedback
    • Namespace bump (jp)

  • Version 1.0.0 of XEP-0381 (Internet of Things Special Interest Group (IoT SIG))

    • Accepted by Council (XEP Editor: jsc)

  • Version 0.2.0 of XEP-0383 (Burner JIDs)

    • Improve security considerations and add listing JIDs. (ssw)

  • Version 0.2.0 of XEP-0458 (Community Code of Conduct)

    • Integrate various comments from various sources (dwd)

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.

  • No Last Call this month.

Draft

  • No Draft this month.

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, Benoît Sibaud, DebXwoody, COM8, emus, mattJ, neox, Licaon_Kter, pmaziere, raspbeguy, wurstsalat3000, Ysabeau for their support and help in creation, review and translation!

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