Development Update — May 14

Largest day on develop in recent memory. Three big arcs land: federated send for group chat (members publish to their own feeds instead of relaying through the owner), the admin-role + admin-mirror cascade, and the skymail-bridge for email-over-skywire. Plus a sweep of fixes to the per-peerSub liveness model from yesterday, the dmsgpty-via-visor-RPC routing, and specs cleanup.

Skywire: Skychat/Group — Federated Send

PR #2580 inverts the v1 model. Pre-fix: only the owner published; members had to route through the owner’s relay listener (PR #2506). Post-fix: every member publishes to their own per-PK feed; other members subscribe to every other member’s feed.

Pre:
  member1 ──relay──> owner ──publish──> CXO feed ──> member2

Post:
  member1 ──publish──> member1's feed ──> member2
  member2 ──publish──> member2's feed ──> member1
  owner   ──publish──> owner's feed   ──> all

The relay listener stays for backward compatibility with pre-federated members. Owners on the new binary publish to their own feed AND continue to accept relay submissions, so a mixed-binary group keeps working.

The new shape is more resilient: a wedged owner publisher used to silently drop every member’s send. Now members send through their own publishers and reach every other member directly. The owner becomes one peer among many.

Skywire: Skychat/Group — Admin Role + Admin-Set Management

A three-PR stack rebuilds the roster-authority model:

2583 feat(skychat): admin role + admin-set management (1/3) — separates “who can edit the roster” from “who owns the publisher”. The Record gains an Admins []cipher.PubKey field. The founder (OwnerPK) is always in the admin set; additional admins are added via promote/demote operations.

Visors with admin role can: add members, issue invites, delete the group, promote/demote other admins (founder excluded — the founder cannot be demoted).

2584 feat(skychat): admin mirror feed wiring (2/3) — admins-set + members-set propagation. Admins publish a mirror CXO feed alongside their messages feed; the mirror carries roster changes (member added, admin promoted, etc.) as ordered events. Subscribers replay the events to keep their local roster in sync with the admin’s view.

2585 feat(skychat): member subscribe to admin mirrors + dedup (3/3) — members subscribe to every admin’s mirror feed and apply roster changes locally, with dedup across the mirrors (a change can be observed via multiple admins’ mirrors; only one applies). Closes the “roster gossip” gap that’s been outstanding since the group-chat work began.

Skywire: Skychat/Group — Per-PeerSub Liveness Signal

PR #2606 (with the same-day fixups #2595, #2600, #2601) introduces per-peerSub liveness. The earlier work (PR #2537) collapsed four liveness flags into one session-wide lastInboundNs. But the session-wide signal aggregates across all peerSubs in the group — one chatty peer keeps the session “fresh” even when another peer’s peerSub is silently wedged.

The fix: each peerSub gets its own lastInboundNs (per-peer atomic int64 keyed by PK). detectStaleAndReconnect iterates each peer’s signal independently; a silent peer triggers a per-peer reconnect even when other peers are chatty.

Companion fixes:

• 2595 fix(skychat/group): owner-role peerSubs also need reconnect coverage — owner-role sessions also have peerSubs (every member’s feed). Pre-fix, only member-role sessions got reconnect coverage. Owners with stale peerSubs were silently missing other members’ sends.
• 2600 fix(skychat/group): Session.Connect only declares fresh on actual success — partial Connect failures (legacy s.sub succeeds, peerSubs fail) were declaring the session fresh, masking the failure. Now any peerSub failure surfaces it.
• 2601 fix(skychat/group): owner’s own heartbeat must not bump lastInboundNs — the owner emits heartbeats; observing your own heartbeat shouldn’t count as “I’m receiving from a peer”. Filtered out.
• 2608 fix(skychat/group): thread context.Context through Connect / ReconnectPeer — the reconnect attempt-timeout was implemented via a goroutine + time.After. The goroutine leaked when the timeout fired. Threading a context through the call chain lets the underlying dial honor the deadline and exit cleanly.

Skywire: Skymail-Bridge — SMTP Over Skywire

2598 feat(skymail-bridge): SMTP-aware sender-side bridge for skywire email — a new top-level binary, cmd/skymail-bridge, that bridges SMTP to skywire. The model:

• Receiver-side: run skymail-bridge as a virtual postfix-transport target. Postfix delivers mail to it for *.<base32-pk>.skynet domains; skymail-bridge strips the <pk>.skynet portion and hands the bare-PK envelope to the local postfix’s virtual-alias chain for delivery.
• Sender-side: skymail-bridge listens on a local SMTP port; sending to user@<base32-pk>.skynet opens a skywire route to the destination PK and delivers the envelope.

The address shape (user@<base32-pk>.skynet) survives RFC 1035’s 63-octet DNS label limit because base32 of a 33-byte PK is 52 chars. Hex would be 66 chars and break.

Companion PR 2605 feat(skymail-bridge): mode b accepts both host-prefixed and bare-PK shapes — the receive side accepts envelopes with or without the .<pk>.skynet suffix, so the existing virtual_alias chain can route either way.

Operator recipe: 2604 docs(guides): skymail-bridge operator recipe + Postfix overrides — step-by-step guide for the postfix-side configuration.

Skywire: DmsgPty CLI — Route Through Visor RPC

a67033110 feat(cli/dmsg): route skywire cli dmsg pty exec through visor RPC — cli dmsg pty exec used to bypass the visor and open a fresh dmsg client from the CLI process. That meant another full noise handshake per call, and operators with a paused visor (suspended via cli halt) couldn’t run pty commands until they restarted.

Now the CLI sends a DmsgPtyExec RPC request to the running visor; the visor’s dmsg client handles the actual transport. Subsequent calls reuse the visor’s open dmsg sessions. The --via tcp://<pk>@<host:port> direct-TCP path (from yesterday’s PRs #2559–#2561) remains the bypass for cases where the visor is unreachable.

Skywire: Specs Cleanup

A coordinated audit of the specifications/ tree:

• 29d95e14f docs(specs): strip non-normative content from specifications — discussion, rationale, and implementation notes move out of the normative spec docs.
• 6c6311f79 docs(specs): TPD reg via CXO subscription + HTTP dual-write; drop DHT mentions — TPD spec brought in line with the post-DHT-removal reality.
• c18ba1855 docs(specs): purge Kademlia DHT references — DHT is no longer wired — the global purge pass.
• 64459173a docs(specs): trim implementation detail from TPD + Transport Management — TPD spec sheds the Redis-flavored schema in favor of a backing-store-agnostic data model table.

Skywire: Skychat — Network Fallback + Relay-Ack + Group gRPC Streaming

Three skychat polish PRs:

• 2571 feat(skychat/group): server-streaming gRPC for group listen — replaces the long-poll loop. cli skychat group listen opens a server-streaming gRPC stream; messages arrive push-style with much lower latency.
• 2574 feat(skychat): network fallback — try alternate transport on send failure — a 1:1 send that fails on skynet (e.g. no route available) now retries on dmsg before surfacing failure to the caller. Same alternation in reverse for dmsg-first sends.
• 2575 feat(skychat/group): relay-ack for member→owner sends — when a member sends via the owner’s relay (the backward-compat path), the relay listener now sends a frame-level ack so the member knows the relay actually processed the message.

Skywire: Other

• 2572 feat(cli): ssh + sshd commands — OpenSSH-equivalent surface over skywire identity — cli ssh <pk> opens an interactive shell on the peer (built on dmsgpty); cli sshd runs the daemon side. Same authentication surface (dmsgpty_whitelist), just an ergonomic OpenSSH-shaped wrapper.
• 2573 feat(cli/skychat): default –wait=5s for delivery-confirmed send — the --wait flag from PR #2511 was off by default. Now defaults to 5s; fire-and-forget is --wait=0.
• 2578 feat(skychat/group): persistent group history at the visor layer — group history is no longer a chat-app-only concern; the visor persists it in the same store as 1:1 history, so a chat-app restart preserves the backlog without depending on chat-app-side bbolt.
• 2582 docs: cobra-driven docs/skywire/ tree + hidden skywire doc generator. Each command renders its --help into a markdown page; the doc site rebuilds from one source.
• 2590 feat(docs): MkDocs Material site at skycoin.github.io/skywire.
• 2599 fix(cxo/treestore): release publisher mutex around encode + bbolt write — the CXO publisher mutex was held during the entire encode + bbolt write. Decouples encode + write from the mutex so concurrent reads aren’t blocked by serialization.
• 2594/2596 cli/config/gen: default --pair-enable on skychat for groups to work; SKYCHATPAIR knob for --pair-enable.
• 2602/2603 fix: kebab-case --dmsg-port, fix garbled --config; skychat uses local ServeMux so RunSkychat is re-entrant.