GNUnet Messenger API: March 2024

Hello again,

this month we finally got the release of GNUnet 0.21.0 and in addition we released a new release of libgnunetchat and both messenger front-ends. I tried to make sure the flatpak and snap packages work. However there were some difficulties.

For example the flatpak runtime, the application uses, did not contain libportal for some reason. I needed to include that. The release of libgnunetchat caused a build issue because it required a dependency from the new meson build of GNUnet. The usage of Pipewire caused an immediate crash because of missing permissions. At the same time I worked on the flatpak manifest to make it update its dependencies automatically in the future via the external data checker that Flathub provides.

public relation picture of the messenger application

In the end the flatpak seems to work now. Only camera access is still not fully cooked yet. On my Librem 5 it gives a format error and fails to show an image. If no camera is connected at all, the application might freeze for a while when opening the dialog to add a contact. So I’m still looking into fixing both issues. The first issue might actually be related to GStreamer requesting an unknown resolution from the camera to display which potentially results in memory limitations. At least when trying to open up a pipeline from terminal, it also failed because of lacking memory.

Was it any easier with the snap package? Not really. The whole build failed when running into GNUnet 0.21.0 requiring a later version of cURL than currently supplied in the Ubuntu repositories from 22.04 LTS. So I’m currently waiting for the upcoming LTS release in April to bump the snap up to using core24 as base. Until then it’ll stick to the previous release.

I definitely ran into quite a lot of problems during all of this which did not occur consistently during testing on my own devices when building from source. So I’ve made notes and started fixing issues as well as adding some missing quality of life features. For example I’ve added a list of the blocked contacts to the settings panel now. You can search inside your chats for messages by text. Downloaded files will automatically trigger a refresh to potentially view the content in case of images and animations. Tags will now be listed below a message but I still need to implement the dialog to tag messages.

Anyway I will probably publish a minor release soon to bring those changes and fixes. The focus is currently on making changes which do not require any major adjustments in the GNUnet service. So I don’t need to wait for another release for publishing my changes. I assume this might account for the profile pictures as well. But before I implement that libgnunetchat needs some changes to allow giving accounts a proper nick name. At the moment account names are still the equivalent of the GNS identity name which does not allow any form of UTF-8 string. So that’s not great for usability yet.

On the other hand there’s still a lot of work in progress in GNUnet to bring NAT traversal, improve connection reliability and reducing power consumption for low power devices. But a lot progress has been made with the new transport layer already. So hopefully it won’t take long anymore to see practical use for the casual user.

Kind regards,
Jacki

Read original article

Popular posts from this blog

GNUnet Messenger API: March

Image
Hi again, Last time I had big hopes to make enough progress for a first release. But I think I’m gonna delay that a bit (maybe still this month but we will see) even though I could actually complete the things, I anticipated. However here is finally the long promised video of it running on the Pinephone Pro because there’s still much to show. The back-end of the messenger-gtk application called libgnunetchat now uses the GNUnet Name Store service to manage your chats instead of using a local directory and some configuration files for each chat as before. This means that it is now possible to start the application from any directory and it will properly sync the chats depending on the account/identity selected. Next big feature is that it is possible to generate so called lobbies. Lobbies are empty chat rooms which will be shared in form of a GNS record under a newly generated zone instead of your own identity zone. This has multiple reasons: Technically your own key could
Read more

GNUnet Messenger API: September

Image
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 opt
Read more

GNUnet Messenger API: December

Image
Hello again, Here is a little update to the GNUnet Messenger API from December. This time I’ve added a short video to show how it works at the moment on a local machine with multiple clients. I’ve now added most dialogs to invite contacts to groups, open custom private groups, open chats directly to your contacts and open public platforms (public chat rooms). Filtering the contacts in those dialogs using a search field will be implemented soon (this is visual only for now). Sending files should work in theory already but I haven’t hooked up visually representing those file messages. But it will likely be very similar to the implementation of it used in cadet-gtk . Chats will now allow renaming for contacts and update each widget using it. Also it is now possible to have persistent chats between closing and opening the application which will be necessary for ease of use. Many bugs got sorted out in libgnunetchat but there’s still a lack of thread safety which needs to be addres
Read more