Weekly Dev Update #141

Hey y’all, 

This week the Oxen Core team continued work on the Oxen Name System for wallets. The Lokinet team migrated from Gtest to Catch2, merged support for Lokinet on Android, and tracked down and fixed a number of performance issues. The Session team continued work on multidevice syncing, responding to user feedback, and releasing a new version of multidevice which syncs empty contacts and profile pictures correctly. 

Oxen Core 

Most of the Oxen Core team is working on other projects this week, with Jason focusing on Lokinet and Sean working on the wOxen-Oxen bridge. However, we have made some further progress on ONS for wallets.

• Continue building Oxen name service wallet names https://github.com/darcys22/loki-core/commits/1402-ons-names-for-transfers 

Lokinet 

We spent last week polishing off and merging several large PRs, including core Android support and a long-overdue refactor of the core networking on job dispatching code. This also delivers some performance improvements and lays the groundwork for the QUIC tunneling that we need for liblokinet. We’re planning on making a new 0.8.4 stable public release this week with the various improvements we’ve made, and are pushing forward with getting a preliminary tunnelling library version of Lokinet (on the dev branch, for a 0.9.0 release) by early next week.

• Continuous integration pre-built docker images to considerably speed up testing builds https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1550, https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1558, https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1560, https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1567

• Finished off and merged the working, core Android support (we still have testing and significant GUI work, but the basic lokinet works on Android now, including exit support! Please let us know if you’d like to try a test build) https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1537

• Finished migrating test suite from gtest/gmock to Catch2 https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1556, https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1561

• Enforce unique IPs (or, optionally, unique net blocks) per hop on built paths https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1539

• MX records for snapps https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1548

• Fix setcap detection and builds https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1565, https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1566, https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1554

• Fix IPv4 exit traffic (broken by earlier commits on dev branch) https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1564

• Use consistent paths instead of changing on each packet for significant jitter (i.e. connection latency variation) improvements https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1563

• Drop multi-packet acknowledgement for further jitter/latency improvements https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1535

• Replace libuv code with uvw (a much nicer, C++ libuv wrapper) and refactor the core logic thread around it https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1557, https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1569, https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1570

• Upgrade clang-format https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1568

• Merge current dev branch changes into the stable branch in preparation for a 0.8.4 release https://github.com/oxen-io/loki-network/pull/1571

Session

This week the team released a new multidevice version which syncs empty contacts and profile images, which should improve the multidevice experience. The team also worked on resolving issues with sending attachments, and continued fleshing out some upcoming features like saving draft conversations locally and screenshot notifications. 

Session iOS 

• Japanese translation fixes, https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/366 (Thanks to community member beantaco for this) 

• Don’t download attachments from untrusted contacts https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/365

• Fix profile handling https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/364

• Resolve ONS names in app https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/363

• Work on user being notified of screenshots and saving of media https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/362

• Show unread count on scrolling to bottom button https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/361

• Add conversation screen documentation https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/360 

• Add saving of draft conversations https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios/pull/359 

Session Android 

• Message sending pipeline refactorisation and testing https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/469

• Multidevice issue fixes https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/468

• Japanese translation fixes https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android/pull/470 (Thanks to community member beantaco for this)

Session Desktop

• Add correct attachment padding https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/1534

• Improve redux speed https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/1530

• Fix SUID issue https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/1528

• Japanese translation fixes https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/1533 (Thanks to community member beantaco for this)

• Test cleanups https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/1532

• QR code seed dialogue https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/pull/1531

Thanks,  

Kee