jdev - 2022-02-07

Welp, I think in here I said I found it easier to hand out pre registered accounts but I tried to do that earlier and spent over an hour trying to get someone set up with an xmpp account and make a call (we were never successful at making the call). Apparently even an experienced user can't do it.

oops, wrong room (though still relevant I suppose)

Did someone say Snikket? 😉

It was Snikket (the client, not the service) :(

Well, the magical invite flow needs the server side

Indeed; I couldn't find a server that was actually working. First one I tried had closed registrations, second just kept returning 500s, third worked but then after I added the users neither of us appeared online to the other and I was getting federation errors in one direction but not the other (but had no information about what that error was), then we finally registered two temp accounts on that server and one of us was sending OMEMO messages by default and the other wasn't (no idea why, this part didn't matter as they didn't know the difference), then the call would never pick up (when someone hit the pick up button it would just change to "Connecting" forever)

Haunted by the demo ghost I take it

Haunted by the "we really need to talk and have no way to connect because one of us doesn't have phone service right now" ghost.

Anyways, I think my dev priorities just shifted to "run a server", without naming names, the recommended ones I found were all terrible.

Sam, if the two users were connecting from different areas, then it may be network censorship or throttling .. often related to the TURN/STUN server in use.

When I travel through certain regions of the world, you have to have at least one participant on VPN.

I'm almost certain that's what it was (lack of TURN/NAT, that is), but no idea how I would figure that out or how to fix it, let alone someone who has no technical knowledge.

I wonder if "supports video calls" is a thing services should show to their users. I know *technically* that's not a thing the server has to support, but I feel like in reality it probably is in 90% of places (even here where I have IPv6 which in theory makes that less needed, half the time I randomly don't get assigned a v6 address because ISP support is terrible)

As in STUN&TURN or a SFU?

I was thinking STUN/TURN. Realistically you're not going to get a call without it in most environments, I suspect.

(I'm only guessing that's what was happening here though, I have no idea what "Connecting" means)

https://compliance.conversations.im/test/turn/

oh nice; it is on there and claims to support it, so maybe that wasn't it.

Maybe there's some internet hichup atm, someone reported calling issues like that earlier. Not sure how to debug, do you get any details without adb?

No, it literally just stays on "Connecting" forever with no feedback :(

I mean, TBF I have no idea what you'd tell the user because I don't think the client has a good way of knowing if this is temporary or not, and "pick a different server" isn't a good look

All I know is https://help.conversations.im

oh cool, I'll read through this, thanks

Iirc that test tests that the XMPP server *advertises* a turn server, and not that the turn server actually works

Fair point.

Tooling to test that would be Nice to have

qy: libstophe is 'just' a XMPP lib. For development it would be nice to have a framework with XEPs. I have been started to build layer above libstrophe. Domain model, callbacks for XEPs https://codeberg.org/buteo/liblutjanus

Stefan: im of the mind that doing that in c is gonna be hairy no matter how much you plan it

Im kinda attempting similar (in-tree) but doing so prompted me to migrate to c++ for at least _some_ hl constructs

Otherwise half the sloc is just pointer juggling

I think gloox supports some XEPs.

https://camaya.net/api/gloox-1.0.24/index.html#xeps_sec

Do any clients use it

TIL gloox. Looks awesome

renga uses gloox

(the xmpp client for haiku)

I almost wish i did now

Cause now im reinventing the wheel

Guess i didnt find it cause svn

I was going to make a joke about https://svnhub.com/ but it exists :/

Yes, gloox is working reasonably well for us in Renga. I needed to add some more XEPs (for example bookmarks2) and I could do that by writing a few C++ classes and registering them with the library

(i think someone did suggest gloox to me before, but i preferred libstrophe and forgot gloox existed, for various reasons)

However, SVN and somewhat closed development, it's just one developer working on it, all patch submissions go on a bugtracker and wait a few years there until he has time to review them

There probably are forks of it somewhere because of that. But so far I didn't need anything that required changing the internals of the lib, so I'm ok with the original version

Swiften's actively maintained, FWIW.

Not lots of new stuff in it at the moment while we're doing work on things using it, but it's there and works.

Sam, did you report that issue to the server’s admin? They might be unaware that TURN doesn’t work properly.

Sam, was it you who was interested in seeing MAM++ stats? https://compliance.conversations.im/test/xep0313extended/ (issues are apparently disabled so dunno who it was)

and Ge0rG might be interested in https://compliance.conversations.im/test/xep0280_rules/

I filed that pr, just got merged this morning :) thanks

Ah, right you are.

I received a notification that something had happened in some issue but couldn't see what it was because the issue tracker is disabled

but yah, at long last that answers my question: mam strategy non-viable.

For Now...

Sam, don't underestimate the unholy power of the green checkmark

true story

Verified✅

And the impending Prosody 0.12 release! Any year now! 😀