Folks: I spoke with Brian today, and offered to prioritize ECDSA in pycryptopp over other things, and he responded very positively to that. He has been blocked for... let's see... more than a year on me adding good ECDSA into pycryptopp so that we can implement a whole bunch of secure, decentralized, efficient features such as digitally signed announcements for decentralized and extensible introduction, small fast mutable file and dir caps, decentralized accounting, and so on.
Now, strategically, one of the most important factors influencing the growth and development of Tahoe is how motivated Brian is to work on it. Accordingly, I'm changing my priorities for the v1.5 release (which is still expected in June). I'm going to spend most of my (increasingly limited) time working on ECDSA for pycryptopp, which means I wouldn't be surprised if the other goals for v1.5 such as handling of ill-encoded filenames on Linux or adding support for deploying on embedded systems such as NAS boxes aren't finished in time for the June release. Obviously, if someone else starts spending more time working on those features then that increases the chance that they will be ready for v1.5. By the way, the encoding issues remain so deeply perplexing, even after such intense study, that I'm increasingly interested in something that François proposed a while back: implement the easy parts first! In particular, I would like to carefully review the extensive alternatives proposed so far with an eye to "What can we do in v1.5 which will at least not preclude us from implementing one of these improvements in v1.6, and especially which will not obligate us to maintain compatibility with a design that we may later regret.". For example, putting the flat binary contents of filenames into the Tahoe metadata when copying from local system into Tahoe doesn't hurt. *Using* those binary filenames for anything when copying from Tahoe into local system might. ;-) More on that later. Regards, Zooko tickets alluded to in this message: http://allmydata.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/3 # serialize ecdsa keys without the fluff http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/331 #comment:12 # add DSA to pycryptopp - serialize pubkeys with less fluff http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/466 # extendable Introducer protocol: dictionary-based, signed announcements http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/217 # DSA-based mutable files -- small URLs, fast file creation http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/295 # distributed introduction: robust, gossip-based http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/467 # change peer-selection to allow introducerless explicit serverlist, alternative backends http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/68 # implement distributed introduction, remove Introducer as a single point of failure _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list [email protected] http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
