error stanzas not handled correctly (not shown to users)

[mhellwig]

I am using XEP-0198 with a prosody server and yaxim as client (yaxim in the nightly version that supports it) and psi as the second partner in the chat. For the case where the client (yaxim) loses connectivity and reconnects before the session timeout runs out, everything works great. For the case where the session timeout happens, there is the following problem.

According to XEP-0198, "A server SHOULD treat unacknowledged stanzas in the same way that it would treat a stanza sent to an unavailable resource, by either returning an error to the sender or committing the stanza to offline storage." I.e. it is legal for the server to return an error. The implementation of XEP-0198 for prosody does this as described here http://code.google.com/p/prosody-modules/wiki/mod_smacks namely "If the client fails to reconnect before the timeout then it is marked offline as normal, and any stanzas in the queue are returned to the sender as a "recipient-unavailable" error."

From what I understand, this error is a stanza that has the same message ID as the original message it relates to, no content and is of 'type="error"'.

If psi as a sender receives such an error (because the intended recipient of the message lost network connectivity long enough to trigger the timeout on the server) it SHOULD (imo) inform the sending user of this error. It doesn't. IMO this is a bug.

It is clear from the server debug logs as well as the xmlconsole in psi that the error stanza is received by psi, psi just doesn't show anything to the user.