who it is

what it can do

associated items

Let's try

We are happy to announce the release of Salut à Toi v0.5.1! This version focuses on security and code refactorisation to ease the add of new features and maintenance.

We remind you that SàT is a multi-purposes and multi-frontends XMPP client, mainly developed in Python. The more advanced frontends are Primitivus (console) and Libervia (web). Jp (command line) can be used for administrative tasks. Wix (desktop/WxWidgets) will be deprecated and replaced with Bellaciao (desktop/Qt). An Android frontend is also planned.

Security

A new parameter has been added to define a password for the SàT profile, it is stored hashed in the database. Its raw version is used to cipher the other passwords - including the one for the XMPP account - which are encrypted. A scheme on the wiki explains how this all works: encryption.

Libervia now handles HTTPS. The administrator can choose the service(s) to enable: HTTP, HTTPS or both.

You can uses OTR for instant messaging end-to-end encryption. Primitivus console interface uses the Python library potr while Libervia is based on the Javascript implementation otr.js. Thus, your encrypted discussions on Libervia are really private because the encryption is done directly by your browser; you may encounter some slowdowns, especially when starting OTR.

Other additions

You will notice:

• the add of chat rooms bookmarks;
• the display of the composing states in chat rooms;
• a better integration of the ad-hoc commands, e.g. to allow the administration of the server from Primitivus or Libervia;
• the possibility to erase all your blog posts, change your password or delete your account from Libervia;
• contextual menus on the roster contacts and the discussion panels;
• a couple of new stuff concerning the static blog pages.

Refactorisation

We care to redesign the code when some conception issues are found, or if we imagine a new mechanism which would work better. It is especially important for a project like SàT which is multi-interfaces and still in development. For this version we made several refactorisations concerning:

• XMPP service discovery;
• messages sending and reception;
• textual commands management;
• contact list management;
• hierarchical organization of the constants;
• Libervia's source files hierachy;
• Primitivus keyboard shortcuts.

These modifications are not of a big interest for the users, but they ease our life, and maybe those of the people who would like to give us a hand! We see them as required first steps to initiate the development of the mobile phone frontend and the add of new features.

We extended the usage of XMLUI, our internal micro-format for describing user interfaces. We use it to manage frontend's dialogs from the backend. The user actions are now better integrated and we will keep on improving it for the next versions.

To be mentioned

The backend is now launched as a Twisted plugin and starts by default in daemon mode, just as Libervia. The initialisation sequence backend / frontends has been improved; this fixes the issues that could occur when SàT and Libervia were launched from a script within a short time. Moreover, we added a .service file for D-Bus to automatically launch the backend when a frontend needs it.

The default paths for the user files are now compliant to the XDG recommendations: configuration file in ~/.config/sat, database and the rest in ~/.local/share/sat. Any previously existing default configuration file will be retrieved and eventually updated.

If the XMPP server address and port are left empty in the connection parameters, the actual values can be retrieved from a DNS SRV record - if one is set for the "domain" part of your JID.

There's a new log system, fully customisable and managing the colors, formatting, filtering and outputs (files, memory...).

Administrative aspects

We submitted the file for the creation of the association "Salut à Toi"... which has been accepted without any trouble, positively surprising us. Our working mode is indeed a bit special for a French "1901-law" association: a collegial board with no president, secretary nor treasurer but two co-administrators. We remind you that there is behind this project a desire to fully involve ourselves, and this is not compatible with the pursue of another professional activity. This means, for the developers, the necessity to find a funding source. We will start with testing / adapting our idea of a good funding model for SàT, of course meeting the ethical and moral commitments that are defined by our social contract.

The association memberships are our favorite source of income! We defined in the internal rules several amounts for the annual subscription, between 0 and 100 euros and every one is free to choose. There's no typo! For the persons who would like to support us without being able or willing to contribute financially, that's possible - because moral support is important too. So there's no reason not to join ;-)

We are unfortunately not ready yet to offer you the possibility to make it online. We actually plan to open a bank account for the association at the end of this month, then we will prepare the online form to manage the subscriptions.

Meetings

We attended this year the "Free Software Days" (aka JDLL in French) in Lyon, "Pas Sage en Seine" in Paris and the "Libre Software Meeting" (aka RMLL) in Montpellier - see the links to watch the recorded conferences (in French). We met or saw again some nice people at the stands and during the speeches Goffi made. Many thanks to the organizers of these events, and to Reflets.info which wrote an article about SàT following the last version's release, allowing a larger public to get to know about the project.

We also participated last week to the "XMPP Summit" and its hackaton in Berlin. We met there some XMPP developers, including two with whom we have regular contact, such as Edhelas from Movim. We presented together our issues with the protocol and will suggest new XEPs to standardize some practices (especially regarding Publish-Subscribe and blogging), and push their implementations.

Saturday, September the 27th between 2pm and 5:30pm, Goffi will participate to a radio program from "Ici et maintenant", recorded in Paris and about self-hosting. There will be many guests including two from the Jappix project.

We would like to organize some gatherings via the association, at least once per year as a general assembly and maybe more often. The date and the location haven't been discussed yet.

Please also notice the recent creation of a "users" mailing list for SàT, it completes the chat room and the "dev" mailing list.

And then?

We would like to migrate our own blogs to SàT. The version 0.6 will focus on blogging (in SàT, it is based on a fine access permission system, so you only write to the people you want), pictures storage and tags implementation. These are essentials features and maybe the last important works before the publication of the first public release, which has been a bit delayed and should be stamped 0.7 or 0.8.

• Official website: http://www.salut-a-toi.org
• Libervia demo: https://www.libervia.org
• Blog of a developper: http://www.goffi.org
• Wiki: http://wiki.goffi.org
• Mailing lists: http://lists.goffi.org/
• Changelog: http://repos.goffi.org/sat/file/tip/CHANGELOG
• Article on Reflets.info: http://reflets.info/sat-le-couteau-suisse-libre-et-open-source-de-la-communication/
• Video at PSES 2014 (partie 1): http://numaparis.ubicast.tv/videos/salut-a-toi-1-partie-1/
• Video at PSES 2014 (partie 2): http://numaparis.ubicast.tv/videos/salut-a-toi-1-partie-2/
• Video at RMLL 2014: http://rmll.ubicast.tv/videos/salut-a-toi-et-si-on-repolitisait-tout-ca/
• JDLL (no video): http://www.jdll.org/
• XMPP Summit 16: http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Summit_16
• Radio "Ici et maintenant": http://icietmaintenant.com

Micro-blogging

Messaging

Command line

Misc

Under and around the hood:

Did you know ?

Future

Credits:

G'day everybody,

I have made a small plugin for fun which export the input/outputs of an Unix command to a contact. The principle is really simple: you enter a command (so far it's not implemented in the frontends, so you'll have to directly use the D-Bus API, throught e.g. D-Feet or qdbus), then the contacts allowed to communicate with it, with options if necessary, and voilà !

There are 2 mains advantages by doing this:

the first one is that you can give access to an interpreter to any of your contacts (I'm doing this with FTP in the video, I have also made tests with bc, ipython or zsh), without using heavy tools like ssh which need to create an access account, a client, an opened port, etc. Of course, it's not elaborated, it's not a terminal, but it can help out. The escape sequences (what bring colors and others things in your interpreter) are not managed yet, and it can scramble your output (I had the case with ipython). I'm thinking about catching them, and convert to color with XHTML-IM (well, a first step would be that SàT manage XHTML-IM :p ).

the second one is to help to write bots really quickly: you just have to make a script with read stdin and react to it. You can make a bot in a couple of minutes with any scripting language (sh, Python, Ruby, etc) or others. And you can directly debug it from a terminal, without the need of an XMPP server to test it. To show you how easy it is, I have made a little test in Python, here what it looks like:

#!/usr/bin/python
#-*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import sys

class QuickBot(object):

    def out(self, msg):
        sys.stdout.write((u"%s\n" % msg).encode('utf-8'))
        sys.stdout.flush()

    def start(self):
        while(True):
            _input = raw_input().decode('utf-8','ignore')
            if _input.startswith('!'):
                args = _input[1:].split()
                try:
                    getattr(self, "cmd_%s" % args[0].encode('ascii').lower())(args[1:])
                except (IndexError, AttributeError, UnicodeEncodeError):
                    pass

    def cmd_salut(self, args):
        self.out(u"à Toi !")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    bot = QuickBot()
    bot.start()

The contact just have to enter !command [arguments] to make it do something (here !salut). To add a new command, you just have to create a new method named cmd_my_command, e.g. cmd_toto will add the command !toto. Easy isn't it ?

I have made a short video to show you this, it's in french but easy to understand even without sound, where I export a FTP server.

I have also made a small web widget for Libervia (it's not pushed on the repository yet). Of course it's limited (because of javascript security restrictions), but it allow to show whatever you want beside your conversations, and to enjoy Libervia's layout management (you'll can, for example, put 4 websites on a grid).

See you soon

As usual, to watch the video you can use a recent browser (the last Firefox/Iceweasel for example).
You can also use VLC (version >=1.1 only), by using the "Media/Open Netword Stream" menu and by entering this URL: http://www.goffi.org/videos/pr%c3%a9sentation_S%c3%a0T_6_export_commande.webm
Last but not least, you can use mplayer:: mplayer "http://www.goffi.org/videos/pr%c3%a9sentation_S%c3%a0T_6_export_commande.webm"

this video is licenced under Creative Common BY-SA

Salut à vous !

No news is good news ! The lack of news on the blog lastly is due to the work on Salut à Toi, which is comming in a new 0.3.0 release.

Really a lot of new things in this release, the 0.2 being more that one year old. If you follow the blog, you should have seen some of them like the radio collective, the pipe over XMPP, Primitivus becoming modal, the license change to full AGPL v3 or the group microblogging improvments. Other are still in early stage like the "Bellaciao" Qt frontend, or the quiz game. This year also came the new website, and misc other additions, more or less big. I will not talk again about all of this, there were already posts about most of named features. The installation instructions are at the bottom of this page.

Instead, let's talk about the new online demo. You'll find it at http://www.libervia.org, and you'll just have to click on "register" to easily create a new account. This account come with a Jabber address (Jabber Id or jid), and will let you talk to the world. Don't hesitate to join the SàT room (menu "Groups/join room", then let the default address which is the one of the room: sat@chat.jabberfr.org) to ask your questions or just talk about the project.

Web Interface

The main goal of this demo is to let you try the web interface.

You can add widget as you want by drag and drop. This way, by moving the name of a group (well, you'll need to add some contacts of course ;) ) to the center, you'll create a new panel with the microblogs of this group. If you do the same thing with a contact, you'll start a chat. Drag over the "contact" header in the same spirit, and you'll obtain a panel with all microblogs, from all groups. In the future, it should be possible to save the layout to bring it back easily.

To send a message in a discussion, you need to click on it (the title bar become red, like for Louise in the screenshot above). When you enter a text, a green banner certify you that you're talking to one person or in a room.

If you unselect the widget, you can either click on an other one, either click on the gray space under the text entry (it's the status area). If you enter a text without nothing selected, it will be your status message.

For group microbloging, enter the target group by writing your message like this "@group: message". e.g.: "@friends: Salut à Vous !". A message written like "@@: Salut à tous" will be public (readable also for people which have no account, see below). NB: the banner will be blue for a group message, and red to say "careful, this message will be public, either for people you don't even know".

You can also try the collective radio, or the french tarot game (which will hopefuly work correctly).

public microbloging

the public messages page is a the following address: http://www.libervia.org/blog/login (e.g.: http://www.libervia.org/blog/goffi). Here you'll find open microblogs (the ones written like "@@: message") from the person, a bit like identi.ca or Twitter. This page is currently really basic, it will for sure become better with time.

using an e-mail client(MUA)

Like seen previously on the blog (well, in french actually :) ), you can use an e-mail reader like Thunderbird, KMail or Mutt to connect to SàT.

So far it's really basic (it's not yet possible to create directories with IMAP, the account must be logged will using the e-mail client, you can't send message on the traditional e-mail network), but this should become better and better to finally bring a full e-mail server.

This feature show the way to many experiments through XMPP gateways or project like Weboob. Thank to it, we can for example send message through KMail to IRC, SIP or SMS (using gateways like Spectrum's ones). Add Weboob to this (using an XMPP gateway that I have started), and you'll can send messages to website like DLFP.

We can imagine "smart" answer: are you never annoyed by receiving notifications for messages from a website, and to have to connect to it using a web browser, just to read and/or answwer the message ? It will be possible to automate this, so you'll can do everything from your favorite email software.

I have other ideas in head, which should slowly come.

To use this, you have to indicate your jid (which is like login@libervia.org) as your e-mail address, the IMAP and SMTP server to use are www.libervia.org (both) and the respective ports are 10143 and 10125. So far, you have to be logged to the web interface to be able to check you e-mail with your e-mail client, a issue which will of course disappear in the future. Other issue: you can't create an IMAP directory yet, so you'll have to save your messages/draft and other templates locally (in Thunderbird, in the account parameters, you'll have to put "Local Folders" for everything in "Copies & Folders").

Once the configuration is done, you can try with a jabber contact: ask her to sent you a "normal" message (the ones with a subject) with - for example - Psi or Gajim, and answer her with you e-mail client :)

Installation

The installation should be really easy (for people on GNU/Linux: multi-platform is not yet managed; please be patient ;) ), as the project is on pypi. So, a simple "pip install sat" (as root) should be enough. If you're using Arch, a package is already here (thanks to Link Mauve). On a fresh install of Debian, the following command should install "Salut à Toi" (to enter as root):

#apt-get install python-pip python-dev
#pip install sat

Once SàT is installed, you can launch it (by entering "sat"), then use the console ui (by entering "primitivus"). To use Wix, you'll have to install media as shown on the wiki. And don't forget the new website, with useful links and some screenshots: http://sat.goffi.org

Okay, I think this post is long enough (and I need to sleep to be honest), see you soon...

Goffi

G'day,

a quick post for the opening of the new Salut à Toi's presentation website: http://sat.goffi.org. The goal was to have something more accessible than a wiki page: you should have quickly a global idea of what the project is with it. It's available in French and in English (any help to add a new language is welcome).

In addition, I was to Linux Software Meeting in Geneva (RMLL in French) in July, and I have had a talk about the project: http://video.rmll.info/videos/salut... . It's in French, I'm thinking about subtitling it soon (again, any help welcome). The meeting was good, I had a common booth with Romain from the friend project Weboob, and I have also seen again people from other project like MOVIM (we were neighbours), Jappix or Newebe.

People seemed interested by "Salut à Toi". More and more people know the project, at least by name. I hope next year the running version will be usable for everybody (not only developers)...

Other news: the project is now fully AGPL v3+ (before it was a mix between GPL v3+ and AGPL v3+) except the data which are Creative Common By-SA.
The Social Contract has been translated to English, thanks to a contribution from Matthieu Rakotojaona.

cheers
Goffi

Warning this post is technical

As you may know, "Salut à Toi" allow to do microbloging with groups access, that mean that you can send post to only a group of your roster (e.g. "family" or "friends"). This feature has been available for a year, but was using a dirty hack (which only works with OpenFire); that was mainly a proof of concept

We need a simple permissions system which can be used beyond microblogging, something generic, which can extend PubSub.
Rather than thinking about tons of pubsub nodes with different access model each time (e.g. a family node, an other one for friends, etc), we need a way to fine tune permissions, by items.

For this reason, I started a pubsub component to validate the concept, and which will be used by SàT to manage microblogging. If the idea proove to be working, I'll talk about it on one of the XSF mailing list, to propose it as a standard.

The way it works is simple: we use exactly the same syntax as for nodes access model (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html#accessmodels), and we apply it to items.
The node access model is applied first, then the ones of items (that mean that an item with an open access model won't be available to somebody which is not in the right roster group if the node has a roster access).
The PubSub component parse the item stanza, apply access model, then save it (without the configuration part).
When somebody wants to get node's items, the pubsub component first check that he is granted to access node (by checking the "access model"), then send him only the items that he can access.

Imagine that Louise has a node with 3 items: 1 with an open access (A), 1 with a roster access, allowed for "family" group (B), and one with a roster access, allowed for "friends" and "coworkers" (C).
Pierre, who is a friend of Louise, will have access to items A and C. Louise's brother will access items A and B.

There a 2 main advantages: first this protocol stay standard compliant (with XEP-0060) - so there is no change to do for an XMPP client to get items -, and secondly the clients have only one node to check by entity that they want to follow.

Some words on test implementation: I use the "Idavoll" PubSub component as a basis, which was made by Ralph Meijer^*, and I have slightly modified it for my tests. The main difficuly is that currently components have a very limited access to server, and we can't access entities' roster.
To work around the issue, I use an experimental protocol which allow to access a remote roster. Unfortunately, this protocol only permit to access a part of the roster, so I have patched Prosody's implementation to get the full roster.
Finally, I used some simplifications by saying that node creator, owner and publisher are the same. This is often true for microblogging, but is very limiting when we think about XEP-0060's possibilities.

Anyway it works, but it still need works (and a standardisation) before being a proper way to do.

Below is a server dialog example. We have here Pierre and Louise which are friends, Louise being in "friends" group of Pierre. The later post a microblog as follow^**:

<iq from="pierre@example.net/SàT" type="set" id="H_77" to="sat-pubsub.example.net">
  <pubsub xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/pubsub">
    <publish node="urn:xmpp:groupblog:pierre@example.net">
      <item id="8f532cc8-be1d-11e1-b5d3-00c0ca4f1546">
        <entry xmlns="">
          <title>G'day my friends !</title>
          <id>8f532cc8-be1d-11e1-b5d3-00c0ca4f1546</id>
          <updated>2012-06-24T18:56:36+02:00</updated>
          <author><name>pierre@example.net</name></author>
        </entry>
        <x xmlns="jabber:x:data" type="submit">
          <field var="FORM_TYPE" type="hidden">
            <value>http://jabber.org/protocol/pubsub#item-config</value>
          </field>
          <field var="pubsub#access_model">
            <value>roster</value>
          </field>
          <field var="pubsub#roster_groups_allowed">
            <value>friends</value>
          </field>
        </x>
      </item>
    </publish>
  </pubsub>
</iq>

After receiving this, the server parse configuration data (the "http://jabber.org/protocol/pubsub#item-config" form^***), delete this part of the stanza, save the item with the right permissions (roster access, only for "friends" group), and only send a notification to group's members, so it send one to Louise.

The notification is sent like this:

<message to="louise@example.net" from="sat-pubsub.example.net">
  <event xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/pubsub#event">
    <items node="urn:xmpp:groupblog:pierre@example.net">
      <item id="8f532cc8-be1d-11e1-b5d3-00c0ca4f1546">
        <entry xmlns="">
          <title>G'day my friends !</title>
          <id>8f532cc8-be1d-11e1-b5d3-00c0ca4f1546</id>
          <updated>2012-06-24T18:56:36+02:00</updated>
          <author><name>pierre@example.net</name></author>
        </entry>
      </item>
    </items>
  </event>
</message>

There is no way to know on which group Louise is in Pierre's roster (this is a classical notification). Even is an XMPP client doesn't manage the per-item access model, it will receive the notifications and will be able to manage them as usual.

I have sub-licenced the component to AGPL V3, you will find the code in my repository (http://repos.goffi.org/sat_pubsub/). I invite XMPP community's members (authors of clients and servers, or others) to use the code, or to comment the idea

Fine permissions tuning are in my opinion a mandatory feature that XMPP really needs, and they will be more and more used by the "Salut à Toi" project. It was one of the last architecture point of SàT, a new release should follow quickly.

Stay connected :)
Goffi

* Ralph Meijer is also a contributor of Twisted and the author of "Wokkel" library, which are in the heart of SàT, in addition of being one of the authors of PubSub XEP. A huge thank to him for its valuable contributions.
** Normally, microbloging use PEP, but component limitation that I mentionned above forced me to use a custom protocol, which doesn't use PEP.
*** I have used a "jabber.org" namespace instead of "goffi.org", as I should have do for an experimental feature, because I need it so Wokkel's PubSub service could parse it.