Saturday, September 9, 2017

Server issues resolved, Siilihai 2.7 released

I have finally updated the server and client code to working state. This took much longer than expected, sorry.


On server side I had to:
 - Update Django to 1.7 -> 1.11 (not trivial, requiring real changes)
 - Migrate the database (trivial, although I made a development copy of the full db to test the migration and make sure no data is lost)
 - Figure out why all authentication stopped working (Django ended support for sha1 password hashes, had to enable them in config. All password hashes will be updated to new format)
 - Some refactorings - server code is really old and is really my first Django project so code quality is not too good. This caused some API changes as I fixed
some of the most stupid designs. There is still room for fixes but now it seems to work ok.


On the client side I had to do the changes in protocol and I took the chance to fix several other issues. This also took some time.


New client 2.7.0 is now uploading to Ubuntu PPA. It's available for Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty. 16.10 doesn't seem to have QtWebEngine plugin so older Ubuntu versions will get the client as Snap package.


Because of the server maintenance slowness I have decided to release the server also as open source. I am not an expert on Django but perhaps users can contribute enhancements that I don't have time to do.  More on this later.

I'd like to see community contributed Win & Mac builds for 2.7.0 soon. My Windows build environment is broken at the moment.