Athena: What does all this crap do?
To plan out the work of the Athena 10 release, I needed to compose a fairly comprehensive list of things people expect from Athena machines beyond the base platform.
Here’s the list. For every one of those, I get to detail how we handle it in the current Athena release and how I expect to handle it under Ubuntu without building so much third-party crud. (Or, in a few cases, that we expect to discard that feature.)
XMPP: Client review
I’ve written up a brief review of XMPP clients to help people looking for specific client features for specific platforms. For instance, if you want to be able to configure chatrooms on OS X, your choices appear to be Spark and Coccinella.
My coworker’s logging bot authorization problem appears to be an Openfire server bug: if the client doesn’t request an authorization name, the server attempts to use username@ATHENA.MIT.EDU as the JID node, which obviously won’t work. This is fixed in the upstream trunk code base (they’ve added a mapping function) and is due out in the 3.4 release. This problem is generally easily worked around in the client code when you’re in a position to make such changes. In addition to my coworker’s Perl code, the problem also affects the Cyrus SASL support in Pidgin.