On 24 Aug 2006 10:46:58 -0400, Rowland <rowland-wind at comcast.net> wrote: > A me-too and a summary of the discussion thus far as I see it: > > 1. Breaking backward compatibility is a bad thing. > 2. Saying you won't ever do it again is small comfort. > 3. Providing a migration path would help a lot. > 4. I don't care about the darknet. I don't object to its existence but I have > no interest in it. > 5. I want the opennet! > 6. Backward compatibility between 0.5 and 0.7 looks like a foregone > conclusion at this point. > 7. What we need instead is a migration path from Freenet 0.5 to the 0.7 > opennet. > 8. And we need it badly. This could be a show stopper. > 9. This should be a high priority item. > > Now... what's the migration path gonna be?
First of all, it should be noted that there are significant technical reasons that migrating content is difficult. Key size changed from a variable size from (IIRC) 1kB to 1MB to the current version of 32kB for CHKs and 1kB for other keys. Since most content needs bigger keys than that, splitfiles are transparently supported. The result is that the locations of all the files changed. Any data migration plan would have to deal with this, and doing so is a non-trivial project. Specifically, it would require more work on the part of the developers (who are seriously overworked as it is) than it would require of the users to reinsert the content on the new network and modify things as needed. 1 -- yup, I agree. But you were warned long ago it might happen. It did. There were good reasons, and it wasn't done lightly. 2 -- actually, I don't think anyone has said it won't happen again. Just that they will work very very hard to have it not happen before 1.0 gets released, which is still at least a couple years away. 3 -- yes, it would. Please feel free to contribute one. Personally, as a donor to the freenet project, I would prefer my money go toward doing cutting edge research into anonymity, and making the 0.7 version work. 4 -- that's either naive or short-sighted. No matter where you are, it looks likely that opennet won't be a viable option forever. We can't just wait until that happens to produce an answer. Also, darknet has *inherent* security advantages that have been discussed numerous times. 5 -- Yep. So do most of us. Myself included. Getting enough refs is pain when you don't know many people running Freenet (I know exactly 1). Opennet is coming; be patient. There are a lot of reasons not to deploy opennet yet. Most of them boil down to a) darknet is easer to make work well and b) it doesn't yet. Combined with c) most things that improve the darknet performance will help the opennet, it seems reasonable to try to fix the darknet first. 6 -- I think (and hope) it is. 7 -- We have one. Install 0.7, and insert your content into it. The obvious improvement over this would be an easy way for most applications to cross-post content. In fact, I'll bet all most people really need is for Frost to do that, and they can handle freesites etc manually. So please talk to the Frost devs about that, it would be *way* easier than trying to solve the problem at the node level. 8 -- Doesn't appear to be yet. It looks like the darknet is alive and growing, though small. 9 -- I disagree. If you want a file sharing program, go find one. If you want a chat program, go find one. If you want an answer for communicating in an actively hostile environment with legal backing to its hostility, you need Freenet. Except that you don't need 0.5, because that doesn't solve the problem. And you don't even really need 0.7, because it doesn't yet either. What you need is for smart, motivated people to be working hard at finding a solution for you, because AFAICT it doesn't exist yet. And I think that's exactly what the devs are doing. Working on back compatibility would be a huge drain on those resources, and they're working against a very real clock. Evan
