This month came with a lot of preparations for the release of Gajim 1.4 🚀 Gajim’s release pipeline has been improved in many ways, allowing us to make releases more frequently. Furthermore, April brought improvements for file previews on Windows.

Changes in Gajim

For two and a half years I (wurstsalat) have been writing (and translating) Gajim’s monthly development news. Keeping this up on a monthly basis takes a lot of time and effort. Upcoming development news will be released on an irregular basis, focussing on features instead of monthly progress.

It has been a while since the release of Gajim 1.3.3. But why does it take so long until a new version gets released? One of the reasons is the amount of manual work it takes to update every part of Gajim’s internals for a new release. This does not include functional changes, but only things which need to be updated (version strings, translations, changelogs, etc.) before a new version can be deployed. Note that Gajim is available for multiple distributions on Linux, for Flatpak, and for Windows, which makes releasing a new version more complicated. In order to make releases happen more frequently, i.e. reducing the manual work involved in deploying a new version, great efforts have been made:

• deployment pipelines have been established on Gajim’s Gitlab
• the process of applying Weblate translations has been integrated better
• changelogs will be generated automatically from git’s commit history
• Flatpak update process has been simplified

There are more improvements to come, but this should already make deploying a new version much easier.

What else happened:

• Sentry integration has been improved
• libappindicator is now used on Wayland, if available
• downloading a file preview can now be cancelled
• mime type guessing for file previews has been improved on Windows
• audio previews are now available on Windows
• Security Labels (XEP-0258) selector has been improved
• improvements for private chat messages

Plugin updates

Gajim’s OpenPGP plugin received an update with some usability improvements.

Changes in python-nbxmpp

python-nbxmpp is now ready for being deployed quickly as well.

As always, feel free to join gajim@conference.gajim.org to discuss with us.