GNUnet 0.24.0 released

[Martin Schanzenbach]

We are pleased to announce the release of GNUnet 0.24.0.
GNUnet is an alternative network stack for building secure, 
decentralized and privacy-preserving distributed applications. Our goal
is to replace the old insecure Internet protocol stack. Starting from
an 
application for secure publication of files, it has grown to include
all 
kinds of basic protocol components and applications towards the
creation 
of a GNU internet.

This is a new major release. It breaks protocol compatibility with the
0.23.x versions.
Please be aware that Git master is thus henceforth (and has been for a
while)
INCOMPATIBLE with the 0.23.x GNUnet network, and interactions between
old
and new peers will result in issues.
In terms of usability, users should be aware that there are still a
number
of known open issues in particular with respect to ease of use, but
also
some critical privacy issues especially for mobile users.
Also, the nascent network is tiny and thus unlikely to provide good
anonymity or extensive amounts of interesting information.
As a result, the 0.24.0 release is still only suitable for early
adopters with some reasonable pain tolerance. 

After almost a year of testing we believe that the meson build system
is stable enough that it can be used as the default build system. In
order to reduce maintenance overhead, we are planning to phase out the
autotools build until the next major release. Meson shows up to 10x
better development build times. It also facilitates building a single
libgnunet.so for future requirements of a monolithic build on other
platforms such as Android. 

Download links:

https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnunet/gnunet-0.24.0.tar.gz
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnunet/gnunet-gtk-0.24.0.tar.gz
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnunet/gnunet-fuse-0.24.0.tar.gz

The GPG key used to sign is: 3D11063C10F98D14BD24D1470B0998EF86F59B6A

Note that due to mirror synchronization, not all links might be 
functional early after the release. For direct access try 
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnunet/

Changes:

Build system: After almost a year of testing we believe that the meson
build system is stable enough that it can be used as the default build
system. In order to reduce maintenance overhead, we are planning to
phase out the autotools build until the next major release.

A detailed list of changes can be found in the git log, the NEWS and
the bug tracker.


You may also want to consult our bug tracker 
at https://bugs.gnunet.org/ which lists about 190 more specific issues.

Thanks:

This release was the work of many people. The following people contributed code 
and were thus easily identified: Christian Grothoff, Florian Dold, dvn, 
TheJackiMonster, oec, ch3, and Martin Schanzenbach.