Ok, time for a general ramble:
So if I had a penny for every time I see someone say "If only Freenet
was implemented in C++, then I would love to help", I would be, er,
looking for some way to offload a lot of change.
Adam has been working on a C++ implementation for some time now, and has
received very little interest from people interested in helping him.
Freenet itself is not just the piece of Java software that we spend much
of our time discussing. The important thing is the protocol that we are
building, and Fred - the Java implementation - is our tool for trying out
ideas and such-like. Whiterose is just as much a part of the Freenet
project as Fred is, it just so happens that I am more familiar with Java
than C++, and also wanted our first implementation to be as
cross-platform as possible, so I started work on a Java implemetation.
The more I think about it, the more I think we need a reorganisation. We
really need to streamline the development process. We have already
started work on this. Due to the research nature of the project, we have
not given as much thought to issues of process as we should have. Due in
no small part to Mr Bad, we are now starting to address these issues, we
have separated development into stable and dev branches, and are trying
to formalize the release process.
But I think that other changes are needed. I think we need to reorganise
things so that the project isn't so Fred-centric. Of course, Fred will
remain our primary focus of effort, but it is unfair that projects such
as Whiterose are marginalized, particularly when there appears to be so
many C++ programmers out there hoping to work on Freenet.
There are other changes which should help facilitate this. We should
shortly have a Freenet non-profit corporation to which I will tranfer
ownership of my part of the source-code, and hopefully the
freenetproject.org domain too. I may be able to get a machine+Internet
connection on loan to the corp, which will be able to handle stuff like
mailing-lists and CVS. Core developers can have root access to this
machine, and other active developers can have accounts. Getting CVS off
sourceforge will give us the opportunity to reorganise it in a more
sensible way. The web-page can stay where it is.
Everyone's ideas on other ways that we can improve things during this
reorganisation would be more than welcome.
Ian.
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