I suspect that a lot of these problems simply have to do with the fact that Jabber isn't very mainstream, and so there are a lot of implementations out there with not enough miles on them to have smoothed out some of the significant interop problems.
On Sat, May 14, 2016 at 1:00 PM, <ned+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> XMPP does not have ongoing problems with interop. Quite the opposite - the
> community is extremely positively engaged with the standards process at the
> XSF, and interoperability issues are detected fast, treated seriously, and
> fixed quickly. If they occur due to specifications being unclear, the spec
> is fixed.
> Every server I'm aware of, with the exception of Google's XMPP S2S service
> (still operating but fundamentally broken) has supported at least the
> baseline of "XMPP" for years.
Dave, all due respect, but this doesn't match my IETF experience, which lines
up with Martin's and Ted's pretty closely. Every time a meeting rolls around I
have to fight to get jabber chat working.
The BA meeting was better than usual. I fired up Psi, which despite being
crappy I am forced to use for work because Adium won't talk to the corporate
jabber server for some reason. Finding the two accounts I had set up previously
were both dead, I started the hunt for a functioning public server. (I tried a
private server once, but never succeeded in getting it going.)
After trying various server names from a list that obviously hadn't been
updated in years, I found one that responded but wouldn't configure properly in
Psi. So I switched to Adium, where it worked.
But the real test is whether or not you can join one of the IETF group chats. I
tried, and it worked. (My past experience has been that this has about a 50-50
shot of working, and when it doesn't work there's absolutely no indication of
what's wrong.)
So after maybe an hour of fiddling I once again had a working setup, albeit one
where I have to have use two different clients to connect to different servers.
As these things go, this counts as s significant success.
Now, I have no doubt that I'm missing some sooper seecret sauce, have bad
google-fu, should not be using a Mac because reasons, or whatever. But that's
beside the point. As abjectly incompetent as I undoubtedly am with jabber, I
doubt very very much that I rise to the level of incompetence of the average
user setting up IM for the first time.
And perhaps all these problems are not "interoperability issues", by your
definition of that term. But the bottom line is that the reasons why something
is a PITA don't change the fact that it's a PITA.
Ned