GNUnet Messenger API: June

Hi,

this month I don’t have much to announce. I’m currently sitting on another project until end of this month. So there are only minor things, I could implement.

I’ve fixed multiple visual issues in the messenger-cli application. Also it got some proper filtering for messages and it will automatically scroll the messages when you are at the bottom of the list.

One thing I started to tackle is closing memory leaks in the application. The idea is that I can utilize valgrind to search for memory issues in the library libgnunetchat above once the CLI client is rather safe. Because I can’t really do that with the GTK client if I don’t want to fix all memory issues in GTK3 first.

So I’ve found an issue in using ncurses as suggested in most examples and code pieces you can find online. I contacted the current maintainer and it seems that I have to use a different way of initialization similar to how VIM does it. But I didn’t have the time to adjust the code yet.

Other things I did this month were adjustments of application information, the naming of concepts in the documentation because the word “host” was kind of misleading and I corrected the internal names of functions in the Messenger service. So now the GNUnet Messenger service doesn’t cause an issue anymore when you try to statically compile it.

I hope I’ll have more time soon because I really want to finish this project. Technically you can already chat with the CLI client but I want to get at least some feature parity with the GTK client like a list of members in a chat room, adding contacts and sending files.

A positive last bit in the end: I’ve tested the GTK client on the Pinephone, the Pinephone Pro and run the CLI client on my laptop in a local wireless network. All three got connected without manual configuration or exchange of hello strings. This makes me very optimistic that it could get practically usable in the future. There were still bugs which I will need to address but I hadn’t had any test result like this before and I didn’t expect it to just work. Most of my understanding until then was that it would work in theory once everything comes together. So this confirmation is much better.

Kind regards,
Jacki

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