RSS 
You know it's really pissy. Jabber is one of those big important technologies to the open source movement. So it should be easy for me to get a jabber server up. I've had 'set up a jabber server' on my todo list for ages but haven't gotten around to it because of it's general forboddingness. So today I gave it a stab... and failed.
There are several servers to choose from. Wildfire appears to be most feature complete but it runs on Java, is dual licenced (GPL/commercial), and hardmasked in Gentoo. In close second on features is ejabberd, which is stable. Finally there is jabberd. Jabberd 1 gets a failing grad on features but is at least stable. Jabber2 is still far behind ejabberd and wildfire, but at least passes, but is unstable. So I picked ejabberd, the only stable and non obsolete choice available for Gentoo.
Well, Gentoo.org doesn't seem to have any docs on getting a jabber server set up. So I moved onto the gentoo-wiki. It has a page on ejabberd but its light to the point of being useless. It has a few pointers but not what you need to actually get, you know, a server up and running. Awesome. So I hit up the ejabberd site. They have little snipits all around there site that might one day add up to what you need, and a nice link to a super page that many of the little pages also reference. Sadly, the super page reads more like an API reference manual that a tutorial for actually setting up server. I suspect I could read the whole thing and know how to configure many features but not actually assemble a working server.
And lets not forget logs that read like stack traces, because that sure explains well what small or large configuration error I have made.
This really doesn't make me feel like running my own jabber server. Makes me feel like sticking with MSN which, you know, works. Or at the best, signing up for a googletalk account. This is lame. We can do better. Jabber is supposed to be important so lets show some love for it and make it easy to roll your own Gentoo/Jabber server 1-2-3!
Update: Filled bugs 295 (human readable errors from ejabberdctl and no core dump dropping), and 296 (Log files appear as cross between stack trace and config dump). Also filled a Gentoo bug about ejabberd 1.1.2 not installing the guide that it's einfo mentions.
