[info-GNUnet] GNUnet 0.8.0 released

[Christian Grothoff]

We are pleased to announce the release of GNUnet 0.8.0.  This release adds 
various major new features at the price of breaking compatibility on various 
levels.  If you are updating from a previous version, please read the section 
on updating below.


About
====
GNUnet is a secure, trust-based peer-to-peer framework. A first
service implemented on top of the networking layer allows anonymous
censorship-resistant file-sharing. GNUnet's primary design goals are
to protect the privacy of its users and to guard itself against
attacks or abuse. GNUnet does not have any mechanisms to control,
track or censor users. Instead, the GNUnet protocols aim to make it as
hard as possible to find out what is happening on the network or to
disrupt operations.

Noteworthy improvements
===================

Major new features:
- google-style searches
- ranking of search results by availability
- user-friendly naming of namespaces / pseudonyms
- added new "hostlist" application which is an integrated HTTP hostlist 
  server (requires GNU libmicrohttpd)
- added new tool "gnunet-auto-share" for automatic sharing of files in 
  directories
- improved GAP search requests to gather more search results 
   (using bloom filter to exclude known responses; possibly the most
   significant individual improvement)
- improved file-sharing datastores to return more diverse search results
   (randomized starting point in iteration)

Minor improvements:
- improved IPv6 support (specifically the code now uses dual-stacks 
  where available; IPv6 now works with the HTTP transport and can be
  used between client and server)
- improved FSUI suspend/resume IO performance
- added options to gnunet-peer-info to determine identity of local peer
- added sanity check for module configuration
- added self-evaluation (amount of trust earned, spent, awarded)
- added directory name as metadata for files in directories
- added options for gnunet-insert to just compute the URI or just add 
  keywords to already shared file
- added support for pausing of a search (to FSUI and gnunet-gtk)
- improved latency of some operations in gnunet-gtk
- various cosmetic improvements in gnunet-gtk
- improved scalability of datastores to handle many results for the same
  keyword (from O(n) to O(1) by adding extra index)
- improved bandwidth consumption for file-sharing (reduced overheads by 64
  bytes per 32k block)
- improved performance of the dstores (used for DHTs)
- writable files (like the content of /etc and /var) are now stored to
  CSIDL_COMMON_APPDATA ("C:\ProgramData\" on Vista, "C:\Documents and
  Settings\All Users\Application Data\" on XP) on Windows.

Bugfixes:
- fixed bug in HTTP transport causing certain messages not to be delivered
- fixed rare crash in GAP routing
- fixed reporting of errors during insertion if datastore got full
- fixed various bugs with recursive downloads
- fixed bug causing problems when downloading very large files already in the
   local datastore (queue overflow)
- fixed bug causing certain search results from the local datastore not
  showing up properly (queue overflow)
- fixed bug revealing that user sharing files is using W32
- fixed various issues with the build process for various platforms
- fixed bug in DHT routing table construction (increases number of DHT
  connections, resulting in faster routing)
- fixed deadlock in gnunet-gtk
- fixed issue with GNUnet clients and GNUnet daemon running on different
  architectures (Mantis #1312)
- fixed deadlock in MySQL sqstore module

Changes relevant for developers:
- Improved and simplified various APIs, including better support for
   pseudonyms and pseudonym naming
- added support for chat (client-server and UI only, no P2P support yet)
- added asynchronous search and download methods to ECRS (saves one 
  thread per search/download for most GNUnet-tools)
- improved performance of make check by using a weak PRNG (for testing only)


Updating
======

It is not possible to update your database from GNUnet 0.7.3 to 0.8.0. The 
suggested method is to remove all files (including the configuration files 
and the database). Peers running 0.8.0 will not be able to connect to peers 
running 0.7.3 or earlier.  A new network running the 0.8.0 protocol has 
already been established, so new users should be able to connect and find 
some content already.


Availability
=======

GNUnet 0.8.0 is available from http://gnunet.org/download.php and all GNU ftp 
mirrors.  Direct links:

* http://gnunet.org/download/GNUnet-0.8.0.tar.gz
* http://gnunet.org/download/gnunet-gtk-0.8.0.tar.gz
* http://gnunet.org/download/gnunet-fuse-0.8.0.tar.gz
* http://gnunet.org/download/gnunet-qt-0.8.0.tar.gz [will be published soon]
* http://gnunet.org/download/win32/Setup-0.8.0.exe [will be published soon]

Contact
======

Homepage: http://gnunet.org/
Forum: https://gnunet.org/drupal/
Bug tracker: https://gnunet.org/mantis/
IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnunet