Matthew Toseland wrote: > Ian has stated that Frost is a separate project, and we should not wait > for a usable FMS. (Background: Frost has been severely DoS'ed recently due > to being based on KSK queues, and FMS is the answer). Right now we are not > actually being DoS'ed, but yesterday we were; the spammer occasionally > takes a day off, but IMHO he's likely to stop spamming now until shortly > before we ship 0.7.0, and then make Frost unusable again. > > 1) We could just not ship Frost, in order to meet Ian's totally arbitrary > deadline (not that totally arbitrary deadlines aren't of some value!).
I'm for deadlines, even if arbitrary. Otherwise things tend to get unnecessarily delayed. > However IMHO we will have *dramatically* less user retention if we don't > have a usable chat client - at least on the order of 50%. This is because > Freenet is a community, and no community can function without chat. Totally agree here. Announcing 0.7 without some kind of chat will be a big wasted opportunity. There's an extra reason that makes chat important for freenet: since there's no searching (I don't consider spidering the entire freenet a good-enough substitute), users need to ask for things they're looking for, or to publicize their insertions. > 2) Or we could ship Frost even though we know it will probably be DoS'ed > again, and may be being actively DoS'ed at the point that we ship it. In > which case IMHO we should advise users about this fact in our announcement > for 0.7.0. Maybe some good publicity will come from it - it could hardly > be any worse than us shipping an application which is utterly useless, and > each user having to figure that out themselves! Telling users will put > them off ... but not telling users will also put them off. Shipping a fundamentally broken system that is actively being attacked is (at least to me) very bad publicity, and freenet has already too much of it. > 3) Or we could make a working chat system of some kind a release blocker, > and act accordingly: review third party code and help in porting FMS to > java if that is necessary. At the moment FMS is written in C (and > therefore not bundle-able), and uses a combination of HTTP and NNTP > interfaces (and therefore is not user friendly). IMHO the critical path > would be to translate it to java, implement it as a plugin, implement a > separate plugin with a web interface based on that of Worst, bundle those, > and let the Frost devs port Frost to use the plugin. Some of this has > already been started, but I haven't seen much progress recently on the FMS > board (which oddly is the only board never to have been DoS'ed). I'm for making the chat system a release blocker. If you can't anonymously chat about freenet with freenet, it's like a compiler that cannot compile itself. It doesn't help at all in selling it. Furthermore, people with previous exposure to freenet coming back will miss the feature, and how does this reflect on the project?
