Convos just got more modern

Posted by Jan Henning Thorsen on 13. Mar, 2022.

It's been about a year since the v6.00 release and since we decided to bump the Perl version, and break some internal APIs, I thought it was a good opportunity to bump the major version to v.7.00.

Why bump the Perl version?

We decided to bump Perl to 5.20, so we could get some modern features such as async/await. I can't wait to bump it to 5.26 though, so we can use async/await together with signatures, but that won't happen until the LTS versions of the most popular Linux distributions ship with that version of Perl: It is nice to have new tools to use, but the most important is keep Convos easy to install for the end user.

Authenticate using a HTTP header

Without the change to async/await in the backend, it would be very hard to add support for "Proxy authentication by http header value", but with the new syntax it was quite pleasent!

This new plugin allow for a single point for user management and authentication, with the help of a reverse proxy auth hook.

Brought back paste plugin

After a request from a Convos user, I reviewed the "multiline message to paste" logic and found it incredible difficult to override. Based on this discovery, I decided to break the existing Perl API and make revive the Paste plugin. The documentation also includes an alternative implementation.

Highlights since 6.00

The Changelog has all the changes, but here is a small digest of which changes I consider the most important:

Contributors

I would like to thank the following people for contributing to Convos the last year: Eugene de Beste, Jess Robinson, Joel Berger, Marcus Ramberg, PeGaSuS, SerHack, Stig Palmquist and compeak.

And also a big thank you to all the supporters in the #Convos channel on Libera.

Hoping to make Convos even better with you all in the future!