GNUnet Messenger API: May

Hello,

In April I could announce the release of the underlying chat library and this time I can happily announce that the GTK client got released. The first official release of the messenger-gtk application is 0.7.0 which might look a bit weird but the version numbering was inherited from the previous prototype cadet-gtk.

So the actual release date (tagging the code in the repository) was pretty close after my last report in April but I still waited for the official announcement on gnunet.org because I wanted a proper packaging for users to test it out. That’s why we not only have tarballs available for libgnunetchat and messenger-gtk on the FTP server to install everything from source but you can also test out a flatpak hosted on flathub.org.

From my testing so far there are still some issues regarding connectivity which need to be addressed in GNUnet itself but also crashes which are likely caused by the GUI code. So don’t expect a fully polished experience yet. But I was definitely surprised how easy it was to install the application on the Pinephone or even on a Steam Deck via flatpak. The GNUnet services even run in the background when you close the application which makes it load faster if you launch it again afterwards.

I can’t make proper statements about battery life yet but I wouldn’t expect it to be optimal yet. In general though I haven’t noticed any huge differences between the flatpak version and the system-wise installed version from source. Just beware that GNUnet is much easier to tinker with if you have services available outside a container because you can simply use the many different CLI tools as well.

Besides this release I didn’t have that much time to work on the CLI application. But I can show the current state nonetheless because I never did in previous reports. Also a few changes have been made this month.

You can already see a list of accounts to pick from, add new accounts via text input and open group chats from a similar form of list. The opened chat will list all messages and it’s possible to delete selected messages with backspace or writing new text messages in a field below. They will be sent by hitting return/enter.

There are still quite some visual issues regarding cursor position and visual separation of text, names and other meta-information. Also the navigation is quite slow at the moment because an internal delay. Another aspect which bugs me is that I reuse similar code quite a bit without abstracting it. It looks really bad in the code and I want to refactor it but I haven’t decided how yet.

But I assume most importantly it gets into a usable state. I’m not really a heavy CLI user myself. So it’s possible that I have to refine quite a lot even after cleaning it up and allowing to have multiple ncurses windows open at the same time (especially when the terminal is bigger) but I try to make it easy to use. ^^’

That’s it for this month.

Kind regards,
Jacki

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