Jami migrates to Debian Testing (bookworm)
Mon, 20 Feb 2023 03:00:00 -0500

Since my last post ~6 weeks ago, outside $dayjob I've been working on
getting Debian's Jami package[1] up-to-date and in good shape again
in time for the soft freeze[2] of bookworm on February 12.  It was a
tight deadline and a fair amount of work, considering the sad earlier
state of the package, having been long neglected due to unavailability
of its previous maintainer.

I'm happy to say that as of a few days ago, Jami has made it back into
Debian Testing[3] and if all goes well it'll be part of the upcoming
Debian Bookworm release.  Of course, we're not fully in the clear yet,
and there's still work to be done, but it's nice to take a moment to
enjoy and breathe a sigh of relief with Jami in Debian Testing again.

This new version of Jami has *many* changes and improvements over the
version in Debian Buster (current Debian stable release), including
the packaging of the new(er) Qt-based Jami client (user interface)
replacing the older GTK-based one, git-backed swarm conversations with
history synchronized across multiple devices, as well as bug fixes and
improvements throughout the Jami daemon/library, including the network
and media stacks.  If you use Debian Testing, you can install Jami
using 'sudo apt update; sudo apt install jami' and take it for a spin.

I would be remiss not to mention and thank Petter Reinholdtsen (pere)
for helping with preparing the updates for the Jami and OpenDHT[4]
packages, and sponsoring uploads for me into the Debian archive.
Also, shout out and many thanks to Sébastien Blin[5] of the Jami
core development team for tracking down and fixing what would very
likely have been a release critical bug, which would have prevented
Jami from migrating to Debian Testing in a timely manner altogether.

I look forward to sharing more good news about Jami[6] with you
in the coming weeks and months. :-)

Take care, and so long for now.

[1] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring
[2] https://release.debian.org/bookworm/freeze_policy.html#soft
[3] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting
[4] https://opendht.net
[5] https://enconn.fr
[6] https://jami.net