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

[Martin Steigerwald]

Dropping CC to Jonah as my reply is mostly not related to Kaidan.im.

Hi!

Thank you for your detailed mail.

Boris Pek - 19.08.19, 18:18:13 CEST:
> >>  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

I was aware of this list, however thought that it was for development 
stuff only.

> >>  Kopete 17.08 does not do it.
> 
> Yes, IIRC Kopete has support only for GnuPG and OTR.

I found that very recent versions might support it, but those are not 
packaged in Debian yet. And I was not sure whether that would be really 
the case.

> >>  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 Yes, unfortunately psi package in Debian is outdated and psi-plugins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...

Ah, I see. Thank you.

> > 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.

I see.

> It is comprehensive tested with Gajim and Conversations.
> 
> Please check:
> 
> 1) Have you tried to restart application after enabling of OMEMO
> plugin?

Yes.

> 2) Do you have OMEMO buttons on toolbars in chat windows? If
> not you may enable them in Psi+ Options dialog in Toolbars section.

Yes. And I now found them as well.

Either they have not been there before or I just did not find them. I 
thought the lock symbol might be it, but it seems that this refers to 
the built-in encryption.

I clicked on "Enable OMEMO" with a contact and according to dino-im it 
seems to work okay.

> 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+.

I did so before, as I thought I had uninstalled Psi+, but I kept it 
around. So maybe there was an issue with that, maybe not.
 
> Also there is no global option to enable OMEMO encryption in all chats
> of Psi+: you should explicitly enable encryption in each chat
> manually.

Yep, I see that now.

> > 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!

Well I could test it again, but as I prefer an Qt based client, I'd go 
with psi+ for now. If you like I give it another test and open a bug 
report in case it still gives a backtrace.

> >>  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.

Well, yes, that is what I meant.

> >>  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.

I look forward to newer releases of Konservation and Kopete in Debian. 
In my point of view there are some shortcomings regarding KDE/Qt based 
applications. One being chat applications and another being a decent 
music player. While Amarok is not fully ported to Qt 5, Elisa just is 
not there yet.

> >>  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)

He did so. And I reply there.

All the best.
-- 
Martin