I guess in anybodies project, there is one week that stands out from the others by being way less productive than the rest. I just had that week.

I had to take one day off on Friday due to circulation problems after a visit at the doctor (syringes suck!), so I had the joy of an extended weekend. On top that, I was not at home that time, so I didn’t write any code during these days.

At least I got some coding done last week. Yesterday I spent the whole day scratching my head about an error that I got when decrypting a message in Smack. Strangely that error did not happen in my pgpainless tests. Today I finally found the cause of the issue and a way to work around it. Turns out, somewhere between key generation and key loading from persistent storage, something goes wrong. If I run my test with fresh keys, everything works fine while if I run it after loading the keys from disk, I get an error. It will be fun working out what exactly is going wrong. My breakpoint-debugging skills are getting better, although I still often seem to skip over important code points during debugging.

My ongoing efforts of porting the Smack OX code over from using bouncy-gpg to pgpainless are still progressing slowly, but steady. Today I sent and received a message successfully, although the bug I mentioned earlier is still present. As I said, its just a matter of time until I find it.

Apart from that, I created another very small pull request against the Bouncycastle repository. The patch just fixes a log message which irritated me. The message stated, that some data could not be encrypted, while in fact date is being decrypted. Another patch I created earlier has been merged \o/.

There is some really good news:
Smack 4.4.0-alpha1 has been released! This version contains my updated OMEMO API, which I have been working on since at least half a year.

This week I will continue to integrate pgpainless into Smack. There is also still a significant lack of JUnit tests in both projects. One issue I have is, that during my project I often have to deal with objects, that bundle information together. Those data structures are needed in smack-openpgp, smack-openpgp-bouncycastle, as well as in pgpainless. Since smack-openpgp and pgpainless do not depend on one another, I need to write duplicate code to provide all modules with classes that offer the needed functionality. This is a real bummer and creates a lot of ugly boilerplate code.

I could theoretically create another module which bundles those structures together, but that is probably overkill.

On the bright side of things, I passed the first evaluation phase, so I got a ton of motivation for the coming days 🙂

Happy Hacking!