hi! from time to time, i try to install and run freenet. today was such a day, and i do not think that the participants in this project will like what i have to say.
first of all, i do not want to talk about the features or capabilities of the network and service design. i want to talk about the project, the progress made so far and what conclusions i draw from that. now. every few months, i try to set up a local transient freenet node, and would like to try out basic operations. result: i get some obscure java services running, with no documentation whatsoever, and data retrieval or insertions utterly fails, partly because the network setup might be wrong, node references missing, or known nodes being swamped, partly because of bugs in the program itself, partly due to missing information. this basic setup did not change at all over the last year or so. with such a scenario, missing documentation, no test environment and no working and verifyable demo cases, i as a software developer am too much pissed off to get involved into any further development, because in my life i have had enough hours of coding work being wasted on projects set up this badly, which will lead to complete and utter failure caused by starvation in about 120% of the cases. what i see is that you are trying to create the network itself and the server software at the same time, which will not work because there are too many potential error sources in this environment to sort out any existing problems. you do not make any progress, because as good as nobody is able to help with the development for lack of documentation and useable test environments. you do not get powerful storage nodes because nobody lets this buggy java software swamp their server for long. people trying the software get quickly annoyed because it simple is not useable. my conclusion from this is: you can't build the "real" net while the server software is that bad. to get enough help in improving the software, you need to provide good user, administration and development documentation and help potential developers with test cases that can be verified locally, be it on single machine or small local network environments. with the current speed of development, you might come near to the HURD experience. so i would opt for an emergency break. revise the project organization, try to prepare a sound development environment and write enough initial documentation to get people on the train. also think about the prototype implementation platform. maybe i am wrong. but this would mean that i got it all wrong, which again would prove that i am right at least in large parts, wouldn't it? i would really like to support the project, but it simply does not make any sense to me the way it goes right now. -- peter koellner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ support mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hawk.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/support
