Development Update — May 12

A massive day for skychat. The chat-app gets group chat, encrypted DM, per-PK aliases, history replay, peer-receipt acks, a unified CLI TUI, and the dmsgscp utility — all merged today. v1.3.53 ships at the end.

Skywire: Skychat D1 — Group Chat over CXO

PR #2505 introduces D1 group chat. The model: one member owns the group’s CXO feed and publishes messages; other members subscribe (read-only in v1; PR #2506 adds member-side relay).

Group records live in a per-visor bbolt store with the schema:

{
  id        UUID
  name      string
  owner_pk  cipher.PubKey
  port      uint16          // DMSG port for the owner's publisher
  mode      "public" | "private"
  aes_key   []byte          // ModePrivate only
  members   []cipher.PubKey
  role      "owner" | "member"
  status    "active" | "pending" | "left" | "revoked"
  ...
}

Owner-side: a Publisher writes message leaves under msgs/<senderHex>/<ts-nano>/<seq> in a CXO feed. Member-side: a Subscriber follows the feed, deduplicates by (sender, ts, seq), and surfaces leaves via the existing chat-app HTTP /messages stream with a group_id field set.

Bundled with this is the standalone skywire dmsg chat command — a TUI client that doesn’t require the chat-app process. Useful for low-resource visors.

Skywire: Skychat Member-Side Send via DMSG Relay

2506 feat(skychat/group): member-side send via dmsg relay — members in v1 can publish via the owner’s relay listener. Each owner-side group session opens a parallel dmsg listener on Record.Port+1. Members frame a RelayMessage envelope and send it through that listener; the owner re-publishes into the CXO feed with the original sender’s PK attributed.

The relay is the bridge before federated send (each member publishing to their own feed) lands later in the week. Importantly: the relay path lets members participate in groups even on pre-federated binaries.

Skywire: Skychat Send --wait Peer-Receipt Acks

2511 feat(skychat): send --wait peer-receipt ack via chat-msg/chat-ack envelopes — sending a 1:1 message used to be fire-and-forget at the API level. The chat-app would return success when the message hit the wire, but the operator had no signal that the peer’s chat-app had actually received and processed it.

The new envelope shape:

• chat-msg envelope: {type, id, body, ack} — when ack=true, the sending visor registers a waiter on the message id.
• chat-ack envelope: {type, id} — sent by the receiver’s chat-app on successful frame processing.

The --wait flag on cli skychat send blocks up to the specified duration waiting for the ack. Acked successfully: “Acked by <pk> in <N>ms”. Timeout: explicit failure with reason. --wait=0 preserves the fire-and-forget behavior for automation that doesn’t care.

Skywire: Skychat-CLI — Unified TUI

2518 feat(skychat-cli): unified TUI — picker + DM + group chat — cli skychat chat (with no recipient) launches a bubbletea TUI that combines:

• A peer picker (recent + paired + group)
• A 1:1 DM view per peer
• A group chat view per joined group
• Inline switching between conversations
• Compose box with Ctrl+Enter to send, Esc to switch back to picker

Same shape as common terminal chat clients. Replaces the per-mode subcommand split.

Skywire: Skychat — Persistent Group History Replay

2520 feat(skychat/group): replay last 100 messages on visor restart — the chat-app persists the last 100 messages per group to bbolt and replays them on visor restart. Members joining a group don’t get the historical messages from before they joined (the publisher’s CXO feed predates their subscription); they do get the last 100 messages they personally observed, persisted locally.

Skywire: Skychat-CLI — PK Alias / Addressbook

2512 feat(skychat-cli): PK alias / addressbook — local alias file at ~/.skywire/skychat-aliases.json. cli skychat alias add <pk> <name> and ... rm <pk>. The TUI and listener output substitute aliases for PKs in the display. Operator quality-of-life win — 66-character hex PKs are unreadable in a chat backlog.

Skywire: dmsgscp — SCP-over-DMSG

2524 feat(dmsgscp): scp-over-dmsg utility — a new top-level tool: dmsgscp <local-path> <peer-pk>:<remote-path> (and the reverse). Wraps a length-prefixed file-transfer protocol over a dmsg stream, with the existing dmsgpty_whitelist controlling who can receive.

dmsgscp shares the dmsgpty authentication surface; operators who’ve already whitelisted a peer for ptys don’t need separate setup for file transfer.

2527 fix(dmsgscp): default-on, listen on dmsg + skynet — first-day follow-up. The receive side listens on both dmsg and skynet now, matching the dmsg/skynet symmetry of every other peer-facing port.

Skywire: Skychat /status + Stale-Conn Retry

2523 fix+resilience(skychat): MarkMessage + TUI/GUI polish + cli single-line listen + stale-conn retry + group auto-reconnect + /status health — a grab-bag of resilience improvements:

• Read-acks via MarkMessage so the TUI can show “seen” state per peer.
• Single-line cli skychat listen output for log aggregator compatibility (multi-line message bodies escape newlines).
• Stale-conn retry on the chat-app’s outbound send path: a cached conn whose underlying transport died between sends now redials + retries once before surfacing failure.
• Group auto-reconnect on subscriber stream drop.
• /status health endpoint with structured liveness fields.

Skywire: Skychat /status Send-Failure + SSE-Drop Counters

2526 feat(skychat): /status send-failure + sse-drop counters; cached-only retry guard; CLI –retries — every visible failure now has a counter on /status. The CLI’s --retries flag (default 1) controls HTTP-layer retry for transient transport failures. The retry guard ensures only cached-conn failures retry (a fresh-dial failure won’t help by retrying).

Skywire: v1.3.53 Release + Misc

0111c8565 release(v1.3.53): changelog for skychat-resilience + dmsg-utility release

Other items:

• 2515 fix: owner sees own group sends in local inbox (was previously dropped because owner=publisher and the local subscriber filtered self-PK).
• 2514 fix: group listen auto-reconnect on visor restart.
• 2516 fix: suppress reconnect-spam on group listen retries.
• 2510 schema v1: id/to/len on msg, schema/version on banner, /status counters.
• 2509 history + status subcommands on cli skychat.
• 2508 fix: listen –json + –from + outgoing-mirror + network on inbound.
• 2507 perf(dmsg/noise): cache static-static DH results for repeat peers — measurable improvement on the chatty group-chat flows.
• 2521 fix(gotop): capture stray log output instead of letting it corrupt the TUI.
• 2513 fix: member CXO node dial-port off-by-one breaks join.
• 2522 fix: isMember reads live allowlist, not snapshot.
• 2519 feat(dmsgpty): non-interactive Exec — run one command, return stdout/stderr/exit. Pairs with cli dmsg pty exec for scriptable cross-visor RPC.
• 2503 feat(autoconfig, skyenv): native-Go env-file parser; Windows-aware autoconfig phase 1.
• 2504 fix(apps/skychat): length-prefixed frames on the peer-to-peer wire.
• 2502 ci(deploy): serialize Deploy runs per-branch via concurrency group — fixes the racing-build noise.
• 2500 perf(cipher, dmsgd): halve hex-encode allocs on MarshalText + dedupe in a hot map.
• 2501 fix(cli): operator-UX bundle — config template + WARN, router/proxy clarity.