GNUnet Messenger API: September

Hey,

this is the last post under the topic “GNUnet Messenger API”. As mentioned last time I only had a few remaining things to implement in the messenger-cli application. So that is pretty much what I did with some small caveats.

The only thing not working as planned is file sharing. Let me explain this:

  • You can already write a file path to your text input and it will send the file.
  • When a file gets received, you can select the message, hit ENTER and download the file.

However depending on your GNUnet setup uploading a file might not work. This seems to depend on user access permissions of your selected files. The best work-around I know is to use a single-user installation for GNUnet. But I hope that this can be solved properly, so users don’t have to mess with configurations. More information about this issue can be found here.

The second missing part is that you can technically download the file and progress of that will be visualized. However there’s still no option for accessing it. After download the file is still encrypted. So I need to implement the last part as in the Messenger-GTK application which allows opening the downloaded files.

That means it is only a small piece of code missing on the application side. But since I had to figure out why uploading didn’t work in the first place on my system, I thought it’s better to release without it.

Oh right, we got a first release for the messenger-cli application! More details can be found on the GNUnet news page. There’s also a package in the AUR for all interested Arch users.

Another thing I invested some time into, after finishing some documentation comments in the code of the CLI application, is that there’s now a snap package for the Messenger-GTK application in addition to the flatpak I created. So Ubuntu users for example might not need to install and setup flatpak besides snaps to try out the application.

Overall I have finished this little project to develop a proper API for applications and I want to thank the NLnet foundation for the funding and support.

Obviously we haven’t reached practical use yet to replace existing messengers and there are still some issues with the GNUnet Messenger service, I need to fix in the future. But I hope my application code can already show other people that you don’t need centralization at the expense of privacy for something like a messenger or chat.

Also I plan to continue contributing to those projects and GNUnet because I really like to reach practical use especially with the Linux phones. So it is likely I will post here about it sooner or later.

Kind regards,
Jacki

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