[Pkg-xmpp-devel] Qt/KDE XMPP/Jabber client with OMEMO

[Boris Pek]

Hi Martin,

>>  Is there such a thing available in Debian?

You may ask XMPP related questions in Debian XMPP Maintainers team
mailing list: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/pkg-xmpp

>>  Kopete 17.08 does not do it.

Yes, IIRC Kopete has support only for GnuPG and OTR.

>>  PSI is said to have OMEMO, but does not appear to have it in Debian.

Yes, unfortunately psi package in Debian is outdated and psi-plugins package
is not in official repos yet. This is in my TODO list, but progress is slow...

> I now also tried psi-plus. And found I missed two things before:
>
> There is a OMEMO plugin and I can activate.
>
> Messages send are still not encrypted as I can see in dino.im
>
> There is supposed to be a OMEMO plugin symbol in toolbar in chat window
> but there is not, even tough it is supposed to be there according to
> settings window.
>
> I leave it at that for today.

Current version of Psi+ OMEMO plugin in Debian supports all necessary features:
* e2e encryption in private chats
* e2e encryption in group chats (all members of group chats should have enabled
  OMEMO plugins in their XMPP clients)
* e2e encryption of files uploaded to XMPP server using HTTP Upload Plugin
* etc.

It is comprehensive tested with Gajim and Conversations.

Please check:

1) Have you tried to restart application after enabling of OMEMO plugin?
2) Do you have OMEMO buttons on toolbars in chat windows? If not you
   may enable them in Psi+ Options dialog in Toolbars section.
3) In some rare cases you may face with broken databases.
   Try to remove files:
   ~/.local/share/psi+/profiles/default/omemo-*.sqlite
   and restart Psi+.

Also there is no global option to enable OMEMO encryption in all chats of Psi+:
you should explicitly enable encryption in each chat manually.

> dino.im works out of the box.
>
>>  Only working (!) XMPP client I found in Debian so far is: dino.im
>>  which is GTK based.

Great! Martin (debacle) may be proud of his work! =)

>>  Gajim is supposed to be working, but gives a Python traceback on
>>  activating OMEMO. Its also GTK based.

It is strange. Last time I have used Gajim for testing of OMEMO plugin in Psi+
it works fine. Except Gajim could not send OMEMO encrypted files to server. But
is was able to decrypt such files sent from other XMPP clients!

>>  Apparently there more than a dozen XMPP clients for Linux, but none of
>>  them works as nicely as Conversations.im on Android for far.

Conversations is not that perfect (it lucks support of some popular features),
but it is really convenient and simple in usage by regular users, yes.

>>  Pidgin also does not do it.

Pidgin is multi-protocol IM client and this significantly influences to its
structure and development process.

>>  One thing to try still would be KDE Telepathy, as I read somewhere it
>>  would do OMEMO. But it appears to be similarly outdated as Kopete.

And after news like this one:
https://dot.kde.org/2019/02/20/kde-adding-matrix-its-im-framework
I do not believe that any noticeable amount of KDE developers will be
interested in development of XMPP client inside KDE project.
Hope I am wrong here.

>>  Then there is kaidan.im which is not packaged yet.

I saw mentions of this project few times (in qxmpp related discussions) but
have not looked on program yet.

As I see there is related team on Salsa:
https://salsa.debian.org/kaidan-team

But I have no idea why these packages are not in Debian repos yet and why its
maintainers have decided to maintain these packages outside of Debian XMPP
Maintainers team.

Probably Jonah may comment this. (CC-ing)

>>  There are in part contradicting informations on which client can do it
>>  or not:
>>
>>  https://omemo.top/
>>
>>  versus
>>
>>  https://riseup.net/de/chat/clients
>>
>>  for example.

These tables are very useful in general, but they miss some information about
OMEMO support. For example: in which versions of XMPP clients it was
implemented.

For example, Psi IM 2.0 with OMEMO support is not released yet. OMEMO plugin
is currently available only in daily builds of Psi (from git master branch).

Best wishes,
Boris