Hi all!

This is my report for the second, as well as the first half of the third week of GSoC community bonding, which I spent again working on finalizing my OMEMO code.

I dug deeper into writing test cases, mainly integration tests and I found quite a lot of small, undetectable bugs this way (Yay!). This strengthens my plan to work test driven during my GSoC project. The OMEMO code I currently work on was started as part of my bachelor thesis about 4 to 5 months ago and at this time, I was more concerned about having working code in the end, so I wrote no tests at all. Deploying test cases AFTER the code is already written is not only a tideous task, but its also often very difficult (because the code is not structured properly). So I learned my lesson the hard way 😀

During testing I also found another bug in an XMPP server software, which prevents Smack from creating accounts on the server on the fly. Unfortunatelly this bug will not get fixed anymore for the version I use (installed from debian testing repository, which I thought was *reasonable* new), which keeps me from doing proper testing the way its meant to be done. I don’t have the time to compile the server software myselves. Instead, I work around this issue by creating the accounts manually everytime I run the test suite using a small bashscript.

I also had to deal with a really strange bug with file writing and reading. smack-omemo has a set of 4 integration tests, which all write data into a temporary directory. After each test, the directory is deleted to prevent tests influencing eachother. The issue was, that only the first test could read/write to the test directory. All subsequent tests failed for some reason. It took me a long time to notice, that there were two folders created (one in the working directory, another one in the subdirectory of the integration test framework). I am still not really sure what happened. The first folder was logged in all debug output, while files were written (by the first test) to the second filder. I guess it was caused by the temp directory being specified using a relative path, which messed up the tests, which were instanciated by the test framework using reflection. But I’m really not sure about this. Specifying the directory using an absolute path fixed the issue in the end.

Last but not least, me and Flow worked out some more details about my GSoC project (Implementing (encrypted) Jingle file transfer for Smack). The module will most likely be based upon java.nio to be scalable in the future. Flow also emphasized that the API should be as easy to use as possible, but at the same time powerful and extensible, which is a nice challenge (and probably a common one within the XMPP community). My initial plan was to create a XEP for OMEMO encrypted Jingle file transfer. We decided, that it would be of more value, to specify the XEP in a way, which allows arbitrary encryption techniques instead of being OMEMO exclusive.

Currently there is a little bit of tension in the community regarding the OMEMO specification. I really hope (and believe) there is a solution which is suitable of making everybody happy and I’m looking forward to participate in an open discussion 🙂

Happy hacking!