Folks: Brian is well along in writing his new downloader code. The new design is expected to improve correctness and performance in all reasonable cases, but of course any large change to the code base carries the risk of introducing new bugs or accidentally penalizing performance for some cases.
Therefore I would like to release Tahoe-LAFS v1.7.1, featuring a lot of packaging work, before Brian is ready to commit the new downloader code. Then whatever other improvements go into trunk after Brian's new download code is stabilized can be released as Tahoe-LAFS v1.8.0. Let's plan to review Brian's new downloader patches and to release Tahoe-LAFS v1.7.1 by the 18th of July. We'll release Tahoe-LAFS v1.7.1, and then we'll commit Brian's new downloader to trunk. We learned from Tahoe-LAFS v1.7.0 that there is a lot of desire for Tahoe-LAFS to be easier to deploy and a lot of desire for it to work smoothly on more platforms. Fortunately, we also learned that there are a lot of people who are willing to help! We have a well-defined process for this sort of development: first of all we get a buildslave (operated by a volunteer) which will demonstrate how well our code is working on that platform (see http://tahoe-lafs.org/buildbot ). Then we open a ticket for each specific issue (see below for example tickets and see The Roadmap http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/roadmap for the full set). Then someone fixes it, someone else reviews the patch to make sure it has unit tests, and we commit it to trunk and close the ticket. We need volunteers! I would like to appoint a Platform Master for each platform who will look after the tickets that are slated for v1.7.1 and affect that platform. This person's job will not be to manually test on their platform—that's what the buildslaves are for. Instead their job will be to make sure the buildslaves are running, make sure tickets which are important to users of their platform get priority, and make sure that the patches that people contribute get reviewed and applied. The appointment is temporary—once Tahoe-LAFS v1.7.1 is released then you are immediately relieved of duty as Platform Master. I will continue to perform the role of Release Manager. One of the jobs of the Release Manager is to accept patches which are contributed too late in the release cycle, thank the contributors for their patches, and then save them aside to be committed into the *next* release cycle. :-) The platforms that need a Platform Master to shepherd them for this release are: "Windows", "Debian/Ubuntu", "Fedora", "Mac", "*BSD", "Solaris", and "NixOS". Why do we choose that set of platforms? Because those are all the platforms that somebody cared enough about to volunteer a working buildslave. Note that some of these categories (especially "*BSD") are rather broad and encompass many operating systems, versions, and variants. That's okay! You don't have to have a running install of every variant, you just have to care enough to read the relevant tickets and mailing list traffic and either read all the relevant patches or delegate to someone else to do so. Please sign up to be Platform Master for your favorite platform by replying to this email. :-) Don't delay, folks! We have three weekends to chew through as many of these small packaging, doc, and usability tickets as we can. The final weekend of those three is probably going to be mostly about me shunting tickets out of 1.7.1 and into 1.8.0, so you really only have two weekends to get some good fixes in. Start by making sure your buildslaves are healthy. Regards, Zooko http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923# setting flogtool FLOG* environment variables causes spurious test failures http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/953# dependency on pycrypto needs to be tested and supported http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1065# provide binary eggs of PyCrypto for our supported platforms http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067# Storage Servers version is 0 on Welcome page http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074# get rid of tahoe.exe launcher http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1093# win32 build hell http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098# Support for FreeBSD > 6 is missing from iputil.py http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099# stdout might not have an 'encoding' attribute _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-dev@tahoe-lafs.org http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
