NEWS.md

User-visible changes in "magic-wormhole":

Release 0.8.1 (27-Jul-2016)

This release contains mostly minor changes.

The most noticeable is that long-lived wormholes should be more reliable now. Previously, if you run wormhole send but your peer doesn't run their receive for several hours, a NAT/firewall box on either side could stop forwarding traffic for the idle connection (without sending a FIN or RST to properly close the socket), causing both sides to hang forever and never actually connect. Now both sides send periodic keep-alive messages to prevent this.

In addition, by switching to "Click" for argument parsing, we now have short command aliases: wormhole tx does the same thing as wormhole send, and wormhole rx is an easier-to-spell equivalent of wormhole receive.

Other changes:

• CLI: move most arguments to be attached to the subcommand (new: wormhole send --verify) rather than on the "wormhole" command (old: wormhole --verify send). Four arguments remain on the "wormhole" command: --relay-url=, --transit-helper=, --dump-timing=, and --version.
• docs: add links to PyCon2016 presentation
• reject wormhole-codes with spaces with a better error message
• magic-wormhole ought to work on windows now
• code-input tab-completion should work on stock OS-X python (with libedit)
• sending a directory should restore file permissions correctly
• server changes:
  • expire channels after two hours, not 3 days
  • prune channels more accurately
  • improve munin plugins for server monitoring

Many thanks to the folks who contributed to this release, during the PyCon sprints and afterwards: higs4281, laharah, Chris Wolfe, meejah, wsanchez, Kurt Neufeld, and Francois Marier.

Release 0.8.0 (28-May-2016)

This release is completely incompatible with the previous 0.7.6 release. Clients using 0.7.6 or earlier will not even notice clients using 0.8.0 or later.

• Overhaul client-server websocket protocol, client-client PAKE messages, per-message encryption-key derivation, relay-server database schema, SPAKE2 key-derivation, and public relay URLs. Add version fields and unknown-message tolerance to most protocol steps.
• Hopefully this will provide forward-compatibility with future protocol changes. I have several on my list, and the version fields should make it possible to add these without a flag day (at worst a "flag month").
• User-visible changes are minimal, although some operations should be faster because we no longer need to wait for ACKs before proceeding.
• API changes: .send_data()/.get_data() became .send()/.get(), neither takes a phase= argument (the Wormhole is now a record pipe) .get_verifier() became .verify() (and waits to receive the key-confirmation message before firing its Deferred), wormholes are constructed with a function call instead of a class constructor, close() always waits for server ack of outbound messages. Note that the API remains unstable until 1.0.0 .
• misc/munin/ contains plugins for relay server operators

Release 0.7.6 (08-May-2016)

• Switch to "tqdm" for nicer CLI progress bars.
• Fail better when input-code is interrupted (prompt user to hit Return, rather than hanging forever)
• Close channel upon error more reliably.
• Explain WrongPasswordError better.
• (internal): improve --dump-timing instrumentation and rendering.

Compatibility: this remains compatible with 0.7.x, and 0.8.x is still expected to break compatibility.

Release 0.7.5 (20-Apr-2016)

• The CLI tools now use the Twisted-based library exclusively.
• The blocking-flavor "Transit" library has been removed. Transit is the bulk-transfer protocol used by send-file/send-directory. Upcoming protocol improvements (performance and connectivity) proved too difficult to implement in a blocking fashion, so for now if you want Transit, use Twisted.
• The Twisted-flavor "Wormhole" library now uses WebSockets to connect, rather than HTTP. The blocking-flavor library continues to use HTTP. "Wormhole" is the one-message-at-a-time relay-based protocol, and is used to set up Transit for the send-file and send-directory modes of the CLI tool.
• Twisted-flavor input_code() now does readline-based code entry, with tab completion.
• The package now installs two executables: "wormhole" (for send and receive), and "wormhole-server" (to start and manage the relay servers). These may be re-merged in a future release.

Compatibility:

• This release remains compatible with the previous ones. The next major release (0.8.x) will probably break compatibility.

Packaging:

• magic-wormhole now depends upon "Twisted" and "autobahn" (for WebSockets). Autobahn pulls in txaio, but we don't support it yet (a future version of magic-wormhole might).
• To work around a bug in autobahn, we also (temporarily) depend upon "pytrie". This dependency will be removed when the next autobahn release is available.

Release 0.7.0 (28-Mar-2016)

• wormhole send DIRNAME/ used to deal very badly with the trailing slash (sending a directory with an empty name). This is now fixed.
• Preliminary Tor support was added. Install magic-wormhole[tor], make sure you have a Tor executable on your $PATH, and run wormhole --tor send. This will launch a new Tor process. Do not use this in anger/fear until it has been tested more carefully. This feature is likely to be unstable for a while, and lacks tests.
• The relay now prunes unused channels properly.
• Added --dump-timing= to record timeline of events, for debugging and performance improvements. You can combine timing data from both sides to see where the delays are happening. The server now returns timestamps in its responses, to measure round-trip delays. A web-based visualization tool was added in misc/dump-timing.py.
• twisted.transit was not properly handling multiple records received in a single chunk. Some producer/consumer helper methods were added. You can now run e.g. wormhole --twisted send to force the use of the Twisted implementation.
• The Twisted wormhole now uses a persistent connection for all relay messages, which should be slightly faster.
• Add --no-listen to prevent Transit from listening for inbound connections (or advertising any addresses): this is only useful for testing.
• The tests now collect code coverage information, and upload them to https://codecov.io/github/warner/magic-wormhole?ref=master .

Release 0.6.3 (29-Feb-2016)

Mostly internal changes:

• twisted.transit was added, so Twisted-based applications can use it now. This includes Producer/Consumer -based flow control. The Transit protocol and API are documented in docs/transit.md .
• The transit relay server can blur filesizes, rounding them to some roughly-logarithmic interval.
• Use --relay-helper="" to disable use of the transit relay entirely, limiting the file transfer to direct connections.
• The new --hide-progress option disables the progress bar.
• Made some windows-compatibility fixes, but all tests do not yet pass.

Release 0.6.2 (12-Jan-2016)

• the server can now "blur" usage information: this turns off HTTP logging, and rounds timestamps to coarse intervals
• wormhole server usage now shows Transit usage too, not just Rendezvous

Release 0.6.1 (03-Dec-2015)

• wormhole can now send/receive entire directories. They are zipped before transport.
• Python 3 is now supported for async (Twisted) library use, requiring at least Twisted-15.5.0.
• A bug was fixed which prevented py3-based clients from using the relay transit server (not used if the two sides can reach each other directly).
• The --output-file= argument was finally implemented, which allows the receiver to override the filename that it writes. This may help scripted usage.
• Support for Python-2.6 was removed, since the recent Twisted-15.5.0 removed it too. It might still work, but is no longer automatically tested.
• The transit relay now implements proper flow control (Producer/Consumer), so it won't buffer the entire file when the sender can push data faster than the receiver can accept it. The sender should now throttle down to the receiver's maximum rate.

Release 0.6.0 (23-Nov-2015)

• Add key-confirmation message so "wormhole send" doesn't hang when the receiver mistypes the code.
• Fix wormhole send --text - to read the text message from stdin. wormhole receive >outfile works, but currently appends an extra newline, which may be removed in a future release.
• Arrange for 0.4.0 senders to print an error message when connecting to a current (0.5.0) server, instead of an ugly stack trace. Unfortunately 0.4.0 receivers still display the traceback, since they don't check the welcome message before using a missing API. 0.5.0 and 0.6.0 will do better.
• Improve channel deallocation upon error.
• Inform the server of our "mood" when the connection closes, so it can track the rate of successful/unsuccessful transfers. The server DB now stores a summary of each transfer (waiting time and reported outcome).
• Rename (and deprecate) one server API (the non-EventSource form of "get"), leaving it in place until after the next release. 0.5.0 clients should interoperate with both the 0.6.0 server and 0.6.0 clients, but eventually they'll stop working.

Release 0.5.0 (07-Oct-2015)

• Change the CLI to merge send-file with send-text, and receive-file with receive-text. Add confirmation before accepting a file.
• Change the remote server API significantly, breaking compatibility with 0.4.0 peers. Fix EventSource to match W3C spec and real browser behavior.
• Add py3 (3.3, 3.4, 3.5) compatibility for blocking calls (but not Twisted).
• internals
• Introduce Channel and ChannelManager to factor out the HTTP/EventSource technology in use (making room for WebSocket or Tor in the future).
• Change app-visible API to allow multiple message phases.
• Change most API arguments from bytes to unicode strings (appid, URLs, wormhole code, derive_key purpose string, message phase). Derived keys are bytes, of course.
• Add proper unit tests.

Release 0.4.0 (22-Sep-2015)

This changes the protocol (to a symmetric form), breaking compatibility with 0.3.0 peers. Now both blocking-style and Twisted-style use a symmetric protocol, and the two sides do not need to figure out (ahead of time) which one goes first. The internal layout was rearranged, so applications that import wormhole must be updated.

Release 0.3.0 (24-Jun-2015)

Add preliminary Twisted support, only for symmetric endpoints (no initator/receiver distinction). Lacks code-entry tab-completion. May still leave timers lingering. Add test suite (only for Twisted, so far).

Use a sqlite database for Relay server state, to survive reboots with less data loss. Add "--advertise-version=" to "wormhole relay start", to override the version we recommend to clients.

Release 0.2.0 (10-Apr-2015)

Initial release: supports blocking/synchronous asymmetric endpoints (Initiator on one side, Receiver on the other). Codes can be generated by Initiator, or created externally and passed into both (as long as they start with digits: NNN-anything).