XML, as nice as it is for many things, is not so fun as a human-edited configuration language.

I just (today) switched my Jabber server from Openfire to jabberd 1.6. This enabled me to move Jabber services back to my leaner, meaner FreeBSD mail server VM without requiring Java and in general being somewhat slow. With this, though, I sacrificed the nice web-based configuration/control panel that OpenFire provides and had some configuration files to edit. Not a substantial problem — with documentation, I’m fairly comfortable with this process.

But jabberd uses XML as its configuration file language. And while they do provide a man page, it isn’t very easy to find the documentation for a particular option :(. XML also isn’t very fun to edit with a trimmed down editor (the mail server no longer has Emacs, just vi, zile, and whatever else FreeBSD ships). And I couldn’t get multi-hop Tramp with sudo working from Emacs on my laptop, and I didn’t feel like copying files, so I was stuck with a slim editor.

Oh well, it wasn’t too difficult (it’s a rather verbosely commented file), and I now have a jabberd installation and have migrated my roster thanks to this nifty HOWTO.