What should be in 0.8 and what should be postponed? We should aim to bring out 0.8 some time in 1H 09, so we need to agree on a rough idea of what features should be in and what should be postponed.
IMHO the following are critical. I will implement them unless somebody else does. - Getting db4o working and merged, for much less memory usage on large download queues and almost instant resuming of downloads on startup. - Fixing the Firefox profile corruption bug, probably by starting a process in browse.sh/browse.cmd which constantly polls the profiles.ini and fixes it if the freenet profile has become the default. - Metadata changes: New metadata format, only used if freenet-ext.jar is at least build 26. If the metadata is of the new format, we can use the last block in decoding a splitfile (right now we don't, because we get data corruption due to several different algorithms having accidentally been used for padding). At the same time, introduce a checksum for the final data (SHA-256), to prevent corruption. Allow other checksums (md5, SHA1 etc) to help filesharing apps, and provide FCP access to them. - Plugin updating over Freenet. We very nearly have this already. It is important to be able to update plugins automatically, otherwise old buggy versions can cause many problems which will never be resolved e.g. we've had problems with the IP detection plugins. Also, this should not be a lot of work, we already have partial support for loading plugins from Freenet. - Basic plugin dependancy support. This is necessary for the next item in the medium term. - Freetalk: Provided that p0s is able to continue working on this, and provided that his timetable doesn't slip too much, we should do everything reasonably possible to ensure that Freetalk goes in to 0.8.0, and is visible (e.g. on the main menu). The following would be nice, if somebody else gets around to them: - XMLSpider improvements: sdiz has done some great work on this, the spider can now continue from where it left off, and uses db4o so has much lower memory usage. - XMLLibrarian improvements: We have already integrated the search engine onto the home page, there are many small improvements that can be made such as support for "adjacent word searches", a much better looking search results page, and embedding into freesites. - A new Windows-specific installer, with a more concise interface (i.e. fewer mouse clicks). Zero3 is working on this. - Packages for popular Linux flavours and OS/X. - Hierarchical DBRs for faster USK updates. This is relatively easy, and would simplify life for client developers, who often assume USKs will Just Work, as well as improving performance/up-to-date-ness for freesites. - DDA verification for directory uploads. This is the only significant feature missing from FCP, implementing it sooner rather than later will cause less disruption later. - Freemail: A working GUI and a lot of debugging, integrate in the UI, maybe some UI integration with Freetalk for private replies. - A freesite insert wizard as a plugin, within the UI, much as Freetalk. - A progress screen to be shown when loading a freesite. Preferably javascript and updated in real time. If javascript isn't available it would still be useful when a fetch isn't in the store and is going to take some time, especially as we could then turn off the 2MB stream-to-browser limit. - Major simplifications and improvements to the web interface. Much work has been done on redesigning, although it might be possible to get an external designer (we have a sponsor, Ian was going to send him a spec...). Very little has been implemented. Most of it will be relatively straightforward. Larger items include using submenus to simplify pages and keep geek-centric pages out of the way but accessible. Obviously there is a good deal of debugging to do too, and many of the above may have to be sacrificed. However IMHO the things I have marked as critical really are critical. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 827 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20081216/52ce926f/attachment.pgp>
