flutter_pear 0.4.6

Dart-idiomatic Flutter API for the Pear P2P stack (Hyperswarm, Hypercore, Hyperbee, Hyperdrive, Autobase, blind pairing) over a bundled Bare worklet.

0.4.6

Added: an opt-in persistent swarm identity for long-lived peers. No breaking change; without the option every worklet start still draws a fresh random key pair, which is right for a phone or desktop app.

A host that starts the worklet itself can pass --persistent-identity in the worklet's argv after the storage dir. pear-end then derives its Hyperswarm key pair from a 32-byte seed in the storage dir, swarm-identity.seed. The seed is written once at mode 0600, via a temp file and rename, and a seed of the wrong length is replaced. It is a secret: whoever holds it IS that peer.

Found by BladeWatch. A car head unit's peer restarted as a stranger every time, which caused two problems:

• A dial-only phone's existing swarm redialed the dead key forever and never reached the car again. The swarm went on "connecting" for minutes, while a new swarm found the car in about 2 s.
• Every restart left a dead announcer on the DHT for its 20-minute record lifetime, and every later dialer timed out on it: 5 announcers after 5 restarts, 4 of them dead, about 9 s per failed dial.

With the option, a restart mid-download was back on Pear in 3.2 s.

Fixed: every desktop platform's native addons shipped in every app, regardless of which platform it was built for. flutter_pear's pubspec.yaml declared the macOS, Linux, and Windows worklet bundles as plain Flutter assets, which are not per-platform -- an Android release APK carried all three desktop hosts as dead weight (measured: 50MB in a real build), and each desktop app carried the other two platforms' addons alongside its own.

Each desktop host's bundle + offloaded native addons now live inside flutter_pear_bare's own per-platform plugin folder instead, bundled only by that platform's own native build: SwiftPM resources/CocoaPods resource_bundles on macOS (both darwin hosts travel together -- a universal binary decides which one it actually reads at OS launch, not at build time), CMake install(...) on Linux and Windows. An Android release APK now contains zero assets/desktop entries; a macOS/Linux/Windows build contains only its own host(s). Verified end to end on real hardware for all three desktop platforms (a real build, correct file placement, a worklet boot, and a full P2P round trip over the public DHT), not by analogy.

No API change. flutter build ios/android need nothing from app developers; a Linux or Windows consumer whose own build tooling somehow referenced the old assets/desktop/<host>/ path directly (nothing in this repo did) would need to update it.

Changed: flutter_pear now requires flutter_pear_bare 0.4.6 (>=0.4.6 <0.4.7), not ^0.4.1. The desktop bundle now ships inside flutter_pear_bare, and Pear.start() checks the bundle's version hash for an exact match, so any other flutter_pear_bare version fails on desktop with bundleVersionMismatch (or, before 0.4.6, has no desktop bundle at all). Pub resolves this for you; the two packages have always been released together anyway.

0.4.5

Added: join(topic, acceptUnannounced: true) and join(topic, announce: false) -- for a phone that dials an always-on device. No breaking API change; both default to today's behaviour.

• acceptUnannounced, on the device. A connection another peer dialed in could only be used once this side's discovery found the dialer's announcement (the 0.4.3 fix retries for about a minute). From a phone behind a slow or randomizing NAT that race was often lost and the connection sat open but silent -- found by BladeWatch, 5 of 8 routes from a phone hotspot. With the option, an inbound connection is attributed to the topic at once, as long as exactly one joined topic has the option.
• announce: false, on the phone. It dials peers that announce but is never announced itself, so it no longer leaves a record on the topic that outlives the session by the DHT's 20-minute record lifetime (BladeWatch saw 7 announcers of which 1 answered, each dead one costing every later dialer a failing dial of 5-10 s). Usable ONLY against a peer that joined with acceptUnannounced: nothing else can attribute the connection.

The flags travel as optional server: false / acceptUnannounced: true on swarm.join; absent means today's behaviour, so older callers and bundles are unaffected. A repeat join keeps its first options.

0.4.4

Two small, related additions to pear-end. No breaking API change.

Added: dht.status reports DHT reachability. A peer that only waits to be found — an always-on device such as a car head unit — previously had no way to tell whether anyone could currently find it: its swarm state stays discovering whether or not the DHT is actually online. The worklet now answers { online, firewalled }, reading straight off Hyperswarm's own swarm.dht.online/swarm.dht.firewalled. There is no typed Dart convenience API for it yet — this ships the RPC method (PearMethod.dhtStatus) for callers that need the raw signal now; a typed Pear.networkStatus() can follow if apps want one.

Lowered the 0.4.3 held-message cap from 1 MiB to 256 KiB per untagged connection. 0.4.3's inbound-connection message hold (see 0.4.3's own entry below) bounds each connection individually, but Hyperswarm's default 64-peer cap meant anyone who knew a topic could make a worklet hold up to 64 MiB total before tagging. A real peer's first flight is a few KB. The new cap brings that worst case down to 16 MiB. Found by a security review of the 0.4.3 change's new network surface.