Radicle is a peer-to-peer, local-first code collaboration stack built on Git.

Happy new year!

The Radicle team is excited to announce the release of Radicle 1.6.0 (4a5a51e6), code name Amaryllis. The Amaryllis flower blooms late winter and prefers to sit in the window (foreshadowing…)

First off, we would like to say sorry for the hiatus. As the team worked on some major refactoring, we ran into a snag before we could perform this release. Thankfully, we caught the bug, but as we were pushing up against holiday time, we put a hold on releasing. Now that we are on the other side of the new year, and sufficiently defrosted, we are back to making regular releases!

This release consists of massive 153 commits from 12 contributors. People really banded together to make a better release for Radicle this time round! Let’s give thanks to:

• ade
• icetan
• defelo
• Johannes K.
• matthias
• Richard L.
• Sebastian M.
• Yaroslav H.

Installation

curl -sSLf https://radicle.xyz/install | sh -s -- --no-modify-path --version=1.6.0

Migrating radicle-node to mio

The crates netservices, io-reactor, and popol were crucially valuable for implementing radicle-node. However, they are not ideal dependencies for ensuring long-term health of the network I/O layer:

• popol is only intended to support Unix-like platforms, and support on other platforms, like Windows, is desired.
• Even though io-reactor defines the trait reactor::poller::Poll to potentially support multiple I/O polling mechanisms, there is only one single implementation wrapping popol. Issues for other polling crates are open since 2023 without tangible progress: #10 for mio, #9 for polling, #8 for epoll. This suggests that it is not a high priority for the maintainers to integrate with other polling abstractions which might offer better cross-platform compatibility when compared to popol.
• The trait reactor::poller::Poll can only be implemented for file descriptors which also implement std::os::fd::raw::AsRawFd, which is only implemented on Unix-like platforms and WASI. It is believed that this is leaked from popol as the only known implementation of the trait wraps it.
• To benefit from network effects, it would be nice to see others maintaining crates that depend on io-reactor. However, according to crates.io, the only dependent is radicle-node (via netservices). Contrary to that, at the time of writing, mio has 494 dependents according to crates.io, and, notably, tokio, which has 30628 dependents on crates.io, is dependent on [mio]. We therefore think that even if mio is obsoleted, e.g. by a10 (which is based on io_uring on Linux and could potentially build on top of I/O rings on Windows) the people behind a large network of dependent projects are expected to come up with new ideas and solutions, that Radicle would then benefit from.
• One downside of using mio is that it forces the use of mio::Token to identify sources (while a type that is Eq + Clone might be enough). Another downside is that it forces the use of the types in mio::net for sockets, which need to be converted to/from std::net if required. These distinctions are also noted by cloudhead. This is acceptable to the team, in order to leverage the benefits of a well-tested and cross-platform network I/O layer.

Building radicle-node on Windows

The efforts to migrate radicle-node to use mio, alongside changes that fixed path canonicalization and supporting Windows pipes, have allowed developers to build radicle-node on Windows.

We encourage users to try out Radicle on Windows by building from source. At the time of writing, there may be undiscovered issues, since this is a nascent time for radicle-node on Windows. Please report any issues you see via rad issue or on our Zulip.

Rust MSRV Update to 1.85

For those who are developing on top of the heartwood crates, it is important to note that the Minimum Supported Rust Version (MSRV) is now 1.85.

Argument Parsing via clap

rad now uses the clap crate for parsing its command-line arguments. This brings a brand new look to the help output for the rad CLI, and ensures that we do not miss documenting options when they are added. Note that this does affect error reporting, as they are now reported by clap when parsing fails.

Shell Completions

With the introduction of clap, this helped with the introduction of a command rad completion to emit shell completions for static information.

systemd Credentials for radicle-node

radicle-node now supports systemd Credentials (refer to https://systemd.io/CREDENTIALS for more information) to load: 1. The secret key, in addition to the commandline argument --secret (higher priority than the credential) and the configuration file (lower priority than the credential). The identifier of the credential is “xyz.radicle.node.secret”. 2. The optional passphrase for the secret key, in addition to the environment variable RAD_PASSPHRASE (lower priority than the credential). The identifier of the credential is “xyz.radicle.node.passphrase”.

Fix Bootstrapping

The IP (both IPv4 and IPv6) and the Tor onion addresses were specified for the bootstrap nodes. When a new user came to using Radicle, there was a chance that their setup did not support IPv6 or Tor, resulting in a failure to connect to one of those addresses. The node does not know how to try a follow-up address, for the moment, so we have decided to skip Tor addresses when it is not configured, and removed the IP addresses in favor of the DNS names.

Changelog

This release contains 153 commit(s) by 12 contributor(s).

Checksums

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