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 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 in release 0.8.0
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 result (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
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.
