Lightning 0.9.6

A release of fixes.

Your messages are still there when the server is not

Lightning now starts, restores your session and shows your rooms with the
homeserver unreachable. You get your cached history, encrypted rooms included,
an honest "Offline — retrying" instead of a login form, and search still
answers from the index on your machine.

Before this, a homeserver that went down put you back on the login page and
asked you to sign in to a server that was not answering — with your account,
your messages and your keys all still on disk.

Encryption

Messages stuck on "Waiting for keys…" now recover on their own. When a
message arrives that Lightning cannot decrypt, it asks your key backup for that
message's key and tries again. Previously the only thing that could fetch a
missing key was re-entering your recovery passphrase, which is why the problem
cleared the moment you did and never cleared if you waited.

It is bounded: it only asks when an undecryptable message is actually in front
of you, it backs off if the server keeps refusing, and it never polls.

Reading a room

A reply shows the message it answers. Reply quotes read "(original message
not loaded)" even when the message was on screen a few rows up.

A room whose recent history is call activity no longer says it is empty.
Rooms that host calls accumulate thousands of hidden membership events; paging
through a run of them produced nothing to show, and "No messages here yet"
appeared over a room full of messages. The same run made those rooms take about
ten seconds to open.

The message toolbar works on short messages. On a one-line message with
read receipts, the hover actions and the receipts occupied the same pixels and
the receipts won, so Edit and the overflow menu could not be clicked at all.
Two related layout faults in the Bubbles theme are fixed with it: a sender name
that rendered outside its own bubble, and a receipt avatar clipping a bubble's
corner.

Search no longer claims it has indexed nothing while showing you results it
just returned from the index.

Forwarding is no longer confined to the Space you are in. Inside a Space,
the forward picker only offered rooms from that Space.

Calls

A call rejoined after a crash can receive media again. If Lightning exited
uncleanly during a call — a crash, a force-quit — rejoining that call left you
unable to hear or see anyone. Your own audio and screen share reached everybody
else; nothing came back, for the rest of the call, with no way to recover
short of waiting several minutes for the old session to time out. Other clients
could not tell the rejoining device from the one that had left, so they never
sent it the key their media is encrypted with.

Sharing a window with audio no longer ends the call. Choosing a screen
share source with audio disconnected you: the audio pipeline could not be
built, and the failure of that optional track tore down the whole session. An
optional track failing now costs you the track, not the call.

Joining a call no longer freezes the window while the audio devices are
enumerated.

Windows remembers your camera and microphone. Choosing a device showed it
selected and reverted to "System default" the next time you looked.

Qt Multimedia is no longer started at launch whether or not you make a
call, and a call log now says why a call has no server-side cleanup armed
rather than only that it has none.

Diagnostics

--log-file works when it follows another flag. The command a tester is
most likely to type —

Lightning --call-media-status --log-file out.txt

— exited successfully and wrote no file at all, on every platform. The
diagnostic commands also print into that file now rather than only to a
terminal, which on Windows may reach nobody. On Windows, --version > out.txt
produced an empty file because the console setup discarded the redirect.

GStreamer's device-probe warnings no longer flood the log. On some machines
GStreamer prints dozens of GstIntRange warnings while probing audio devices.
They are harmless and they are not Lightning's, but they made a log unreadable.
The first one is still reported, with an explanation; the repeats are counted.

Packaging

Screenshots appear in your software centre. 0.9.5 shipped an application
listing whose screenshot links pointed at a release that does not contain them,
so GNOME Software and KDE Discover showed none.

This is a read-only mirror. It is not a release authority.

The canonical Lightning 0.9.6 release lives on GitLab:
https://gitlab.smetonis.net/Mizerd/lightning/-/releases/v0.9.6

The files attached here are byte-identical copies of the artifacts published
there. They exist so downloads do not all have to come from one small server.
Nothing about this page decides anything: it does not determine what version
exists, what is installable, or what Lightning will accept.

Verify any download against the SHA256SUMS asset, which is itself a copy of
the published one.

Lightning's in-app updater fetches its update manifest only from GitLab and
verifies an Ed25519 signature made with a key that exists nowhere near GitHub.
Every downloaded file is checked against the SHA-256 recorded in that signed
manifest before it is installed, so replacing a file here cannot cause Lightning
to install it.

Issues, source, and history: https://gitlab.smetonis.net/Mizerd/lightning