Hello everyone! Some of you have requested us to make a status update, so here we go.

Packaging

Quite a bit has happened with Linux packaging this month.

Packages for Ubuntu Yakkety (16.10) are available. Our packaging team prepared for the new Ubuntu release beforehand, packaging clients for Ubuntu Yakkety while it was still in the beta, so all of our clients were available for Ubuntu Yakkety on the day of its release.

Packages for Ubuntu Vivid (15.04) and Ubuntu Wily (15.10) were removed. We have mentioned in the previous blog post that we would like to remove them at some point, as Ubuntu Vivid and Ubuntu Wily have reached EOL, and addition of packages for the new Ubuntu release served as that point.

Empty package repositories were removed. These repositories existed because we considered packaging for them at one point, but because of cross-compilation complexity and lack of required dependencies on older distribution versions we decided not to package for them. For example, we didn’t have any packages for armel architecture and for Ubuntu Trusty release. This caused some confusion as some Tox users would see these package repositories available and add them, thinking that they contained Tox clients, when in fact they were empty.

qTox packages were removed from all package repositories. In the previous blog post we mentioned that Encrypt was going to take over the maintenance of qTox packages, but because of personal reasons he is not able to volunteer as much of his free time as he hoped he could. We decided that it’s a bad idea to serve unmaintained packages to our users, so we had to remove them. Although there are no more qTox packages in our https://pkg.tox.chat package repository, you can still get qTox packages from the openSUSE Build Service package repository, which qTox developers advertise as the recommended place to get qTox packages, and which is linked on the Download page of our website.

iOS

Antidote, the Tox client for iOS developer by dvor, is now on the App Store. Get it, try it out and send your feedback to Antidote’s developer by either writing a review on the App Store or submitting a bug report/feature request to the issue tracker!

Toxcore

irungentoo/toxcore

Not much has happened with irungentoo/toxcore. Incorrect permissions set by tox-boostrapd[1] and bug in LAN discovery code[2] were fixed. A bug in development branch which resulted in a crash of Toxcore[3] was fixed.

TokTok/c-toxcore

A lot of internal changes were done in TokTok/c-toxcore in order to make it more testable and to improve the code quality in general. Compliance with the C standard was improved[4]. Callbacks thoughout Toxcore have become stateless (ToxAv is comign next), which will help with bindings for the languages with managed memory[5]. ABI backward compatibility support was improved [6], [7]. Toxcore was made compatible with C++, allowing us to use C++ compiler to catch some type casing issues [8], [9]. The existing test suite was improved [10]. Group chat API was rewritten to follow the guidelines of the current API[11]. Generally a lot of other code improvements happened.

To allow easier transition of clients from irungentoo/toxcore to TokTok/c-toxcore, 0.0.1 version of TokTok/c-toxcore was released, which would make it possible for clients to support both Toxcores at the same time. µTox nightly has already transitioned to using TokTok/c-toxcore, which means that the next release of µTox will be using TokTok/c-toxcore. Antidote, Antox and qTox also have plans on switching to TokTok/c-toxcore.

Support for UPnP and NAT-PMP is coming to Toxcore soon. UPnP and NAT-PMP are port forwarding mechanisms, they allow programs to automatically setup a port forwarding rules on users’ routers without users having to manually do this. This solves the issue of routers not allowing someone you have not communicated with before to send you data, improving Tox’s networking performance, as the hole punching workaround would not be needed to get around this anymore.

That’s all that has happened during last couple months, until the next update!