SàT progress note 2019-W51

goffi 4 years ago jabber-xmpp-en SàT project libre SàT progress

Hello everybody,

it's time for an update on last weeks work.
As announced last time, the infinite scroll is now implemented in Cagou. It was a real usability issue to not be able to go back in history, so I'm quite happy to have it now.

Finding the right way and the right parameters to have smooth infinite scroll was not trivial: user can scroll quickly to the top, the scroll effect may still be running after use interaction (if you scroll with finger and let the screen, the scroll bar will have a inertia effect and continue to move for a little while), and you don't want that your history "jump" all of a sudden because new messages have been added.
By default, a "bump" effect is shown when you reach beginning or end of scrolling zone, which I've finally removed as it doesn't make much sense with infinite scroll.

The result is quite OK on desktop, but I have a bug on Android which make the scroll bar go to the bottom when new messages are prepended. I'll check that later.

I've also adjusted the delayed resizing for chat history (cf last note) to avoid an unpleasant flickering when a new message is sent/received.

To stay with Kivy, they have an infrastructure for community extensions called "garden", and they used to have a non standard home-made package management for that. That was really annoying for installation (Cagou is using 2 garden "flowers"), and fortunately they changed the infrastructure recently to use Python standard package manager (pip). The 2 "flowers" I'm using were not moved to the new architecture, so I did it following the online guide, with the help of Kivy team. Kivy team is really nice, helpful, and usually answering quickly; that's really important when you want to contribute.
To summarize, the 2 Kivy community extensions used by SàT are now installable like any other Python dependency, via pip/PyPI, that makes Cagou simpler to install.

The rest has been mostly about e2e encryption with OMEMO. I've updated the plugin which was not working anymore since Python 3, and updated version of python-omemo. The author of this lib, Syndace, is also really friendly and reactive, and he's on SàT room, that makes it handy to coordinate our code bases. Thanks to that we have discussed the possibility to reset trust for a device to undecided (the default state when a new device is seen), and he added the required method.

I've also fixed trust management in SàT, to handle correctly undecided and untrusted devices.

Last but not least I've implemented AES GCM encryption (the aesgcm:// scheme that you may have seen in URL with other clients), also known as OMEMO Media Sharing even if it's not directly related to OMEMO. This is not an official standard (it was proposed but rejected by XSF Council, for good reasons), but that's the only way we have at the moment to encrypt a file with OMEMO, so it's a must-have for now.

This was the occasion to use for the first time the async/await syntax in the backend. There was already a coroutine syntax in Twisted that SàT is using for years (inlineCallbacks), but the new syntax is part of Python language, is more pleasant to use, and allows some welcomed simplifications.
Thanks to the great work of Twisted team, it's super easy to mix Twisted Deferred, inlineCallbacks, and async/await code, so I can migrate the code progressively.

With that, SàT has now a complete OMEMO implementation for one2one chat. Group chat is not yet done, but I expect to do it quickly.

As usual, those features are usable from command-line with jp. You can upload a file and encrypt it with AES GCM with:

jp file upload -P --encrypt some_file.ext

(the-P is to have a progress bar)

This will give you an aesgcm:// URL

And to download from the other end:

jp file get -P "aesgcm://…"

The doc has been updated and can be seen at https://salut-a-toi.org/documentation/sat

E

edhelas 4 years ago

debacle 4 years ago