Built, packaged and signed with ricochet-build tag 3.1.0-alpha.0-build1

⚠️ WARNING ⚠️

This is is an alpha release of Ricochet-Refresh and is the first steps of a new phase of development. The primary (and quite large) difference between this release and the latest stable release is a complete re-write of the protocol implementation, tor integration, and most of the non-UI code in Rust.

It is RECOMMENDED that users who want to try this out back-up their original profile. By default, your user profile can be found in following locations:

• Windows: %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Local/ricochet-refresh
• macOS: ~/Library/Preferences/ricochet-refresh
• Linux: ~/.config/ricochet-refresh

This release has feature-parity with the current stable version of Ricochet-Refresh. Stable and Alpha users should be able to connect and chat with each other as normal. The main difference end-users will most likely notice is some changes to the tor bootstrapping UX flow: once connected to the tor network, you cannot modify your tor configuration until the next time Ricochet-Refresh is launched. There may also be some other circumstantial front-end bug fixes and polish.

This first step will allow us to support interoperability between future Ricochet-Refresh 4.0 clients and legacy Ricochet-Refresh 3.0 clients. Going forward, the old Qt frontend will be retired as a new one based on the designs in the designs subdirectory is implemented in conjunction with a new Gosling-based chat protocol with improved metadata-resistance properties.

Changes since Ricochet-Refresh 3.0.38:

All Platforms

• Updated tor to 0.4.8.21
• Updated tor-expert-bundle to 15.0.2
• Dropped libtego C++ backend and replaced with new Rust tego-rs backend
• Dropped OpenSSL dependency in Ricochet-Refresh (though project still required for tor daemon)
• Dropped tor submodule dependency (replaced by tor-interface crate)
• Dropped libfmt submodule dependency (replaced with native Rust logging)
• Dropped protobuf dependency (replaced with protobuf crate)

Build System

All Platforms

• Build Rust from source for all platforms
• Vendor Rust sources for ricochet-refresh project
• Dopped protobuf-related projecs
• Updated llvm-project to 18.1.8
• Updated rust to 1.85.0

macOS

• Vendor Rust sources for rcodesign project