Background

Many groups seem to have some significant number of zephyr users, plus a handful of users of GTalk or some other IM system. The zephyr users tend to be sufficiently fond of zephyr that switching entirely to Jabber is a little unfortunate. On the flip side, zephyr is complicated enough to use that getting everyone onto zephyr is probably a losing proposition.

barnowl-forwarder aims to solve this problem by allowing Jabber users to get on a zephyr class by forwarding messages from that user to the class, and to the class to appropriate Jabber users. It's designed as a BarnOwl module. This gives it easy support for things like zcrypt, and should make it easy to add support for AIM or other protocols if a need arises.

Setup

barnowl-forwarder's main configuration file is ~/.owl/forwarder.json. The configuration file is a JSON list of dictionaries describing a single forwarding instance. Each instance looks something like:

{
    "zephyr" : {
        "class" : "classname",
        "zcrypt" : true
    },
    "jabber" : {
        "account" : "jabber-username@example.com",
        "subscribers" : [ "recipient1@example.com" , "recipient2@example.com" ]
    }
}

The class is the zephyr class that the forwarder should listen for. zcrypt, if present and true, tells the forwarder to use "zcrypt" instead of "zwrite" in order to send crypted zephyrs. The Jabber account is the Jabber account that it will send and receive using. The subscribers are the JIDs that should receive the messages.

barnowl-forwarder currently depends on doing a bunch of the setup using BarnOwl's usual interfaces. In particular, the user is also responsible for setting up:

• ~/.owl/crypt-table if required
• ~/.zephyr.subs as required
• Subbing the Jabber account to the users it needs to be able to send to