Extras/Barev

Barev P2P communication protocol

The protocol was created out of attempts to make serverless communication. The authors were experimenting on how to use standardized serverless protocol: Bonjour(XEP-0174), over the Yggdrasil network.

It turned out we can't implement all Bonjour features without MDNS, so we had to fork the Pidgin Bonjour plugin, and created a Barev plugin, where MDNS dependent Bonjour features were replaced by xmpp stanzas from XEP-0004, XEP-0071, XEP-0085, XEP-0095, XEP-0096, XEP-0153, XEP-0199.

Usually Barev chat is used in Pidgin, as a purple plugin. You can chat with people who have Barev messenger - be it in Pidgin, or in Maemo. There are WIP Android/ios clients too.

What is supported

On Pidgin, statuses:(Online, Away, Do not disturb), status line, avatars, typing notifications, file transfers, and of course chats are supported. In maemo/conversations, all the features are supported, except Maemo has no "Away" status, and it has no file transfers.

If the other party is offline, the message will be queued and delivered once the contact becomes available. The messages are queued in memory currently, after the device restart (or pidgin restart) they will be lost.

Each Barev client is one account. So if you have one Barev in Pidgin on your desktop, and one in Maemo, those are different accounts. Your contacts need to choose where to write.

How to install

Get

rtcom-accounts-plugin-barev

in Hildon Application Manager. It will pull as a dependency

Yggdrasil

and

barev-purple

.

Add an account

Go to Settings,

VoIP and IM accounts

It'll show a list of already added accounts.

Press New to add an account.

Choose a nick, type it in:

And here's a list of your accounts.

That's basically it.

Add contacts

Before adding an account, I would recommend to restart the device. Telepathy-haze doesn't always register the account without restart (at least you can find the telepathy daemon and restart?). And that leads to the contact that you'll add in the next step to loose its haze record/misbehave. Better restart now and proceed.

Your Barev address is your nick@your_yggdrasil_ipv6 address. The nick you already chose.

To tell others how to add you, you need to know your Yggdrasil address.

There are several ways to know your Yggdrasil address.

sudo yggdrasilctl getself

There's a field:

IPv6 address

You can take it from there.

Other way is to run

ip a

If you have not configured Yggdrasil yourself, before installing Barev, then Barev have configured you a

barev0

network interface. You can find your Yggdrasil IPv6 address under it.

Now go to the addressbook and let's add a Barev contact.

Tap on "New contact".

Fill the fields, add name, surname, and paste your friend's nick@ipv6 in Barev field.

Then your addressbook will list your contact, and if the contact also added you back, you'll see them online.

How to add you

Your contact can add you in Pidgin or other Maemo device.

In pidgin, they must use Buddies -> Add buddy.

Then paste your Yggdrasil address in Buddy's username field, choose a group to which to add you, and that's it.

And here your maemo account is becoming online.

Start chatting

You can start chatting with your contact by tapping on Barev field in the contact's page:

Set status

You can set Online, Busy, and Offline, and also choose a status line.

Have fun!!