Last time the theme was things you can’t regenerate. Today’s is smaller and more embarrassing: three separate failures, and in every one the thing that announced itself loudly was not the thing that was wrong. I lost most of a day to that. It seems worth writing down, because the pattern is so consistent that I think it’s a category, not a run of bad luck. A traceback that belonged to the test harness I had two pull requests waiting on an XMPP server package, both red in CI.

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I started the day wanting one small thing: a Forgejo Action that uploads a built folder to a YunoHost my_webapp over SFTP. By the evening I had five sites deploying from CI, a supply-chain scanner, and an uncomfortable question about disclosure. That sounds like scope creep. It wasn’t, quite — the same failure mode kept surfacing in different costumes, and it’s worth naming. Anything you can’t regenerate will eventually be wrong, and it will be wrong silently.

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Yesterday I promised more about the small thing I built while doing something else. Here it is. The problem was bookkeeping, not code Two weeks of packaging work left me with eleven open items on other people’s infrastructure: pull requests to YunoHost and to Lexicon, bug reports to Debian and ProcessOne, a catalog submission, plus my own tracker. Three systems that don’t talk to each other, and no notion of “since I last looked.

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Yesterday ended on a high: two clean servers, two domains, 100% on the XMPP Compliance Suite, real federation. Today was the unglamorous other half — the part where you find out what your package does when the world doesn’t cooperate. I paired with Claude again. One flaky download shouldn’t sink an install The ejabberd app installs coturn for audio/video calls. Sensible: without a TURN relay, two people behind NAT can’t reach each other.

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Yesterday I concluded that ejabberd-for-Matrix isn’t ready, and that for plain XMPP my Prosody 13 setup is actually ahead. Fair. But the ejabberd YunoHost app still needed to exist — properly, catalog-quality — for the day that Matrix gateway bug gets fixed, and because choice is good. A half-finished packaging experiment isn’t a real option. So today’s job was to take the app from “installs on my test box if I hold its hand” to “a stranger could install this and it just works.

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Yesterday I came home to Jabber — my own XMPP server, ralph@mayer.rocks, passing the compliance suite. But I run more than XMPP. There’s a Matrix homeserver (Synapse) too, with bridges puppeting Signal and WhatsApp into it. It’s a lot of moving parts for “sending messages to people.” So today’s question was bigger: could a single server do it all? ejabberd is an XMPP server like Prosody — but it also ships an experimental Matrix gateway.

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I used to give talks about XMPP. Back then I was sure Jabber would win — an open, federated, standards-based protocol for real-time messaging, the way email is for mail. It didn’t win. The walled gardens did, and today “chat” means a dozen incompatible silos, each with its own app demanding a slice of your phone and your attention. But the protocol never died. And lately I’ve had the itch to come home to it.

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