Dear David: Please don't send posts to the tahoe-dev mailing list which contain criticisms of other people's behavior. I want people to continue to feel free to post to this list, expecting a kind and friendly response. This isn't because I have some kind of religious preference for kindness — it is a strategy: I think that in the long run we'll be more effective at protecting people from surveillance and exploitation if our mailing list is a friendly and encouraging place to collaborate.
Now, if I understand your feelings correctly, you are understandably frustrated at the many years of delay, and the many exhausting meetings that we've recently had about this, and the fact that you've already spent many hours writing code intended for this goal which subsequently had to be thrown out due to conflicting design issues. I'm concerned about those things, too. The bottom line is that we're going to remove the "auto-detect my IP address" feature, even though, as Paul, Daira, and Lukas have written, it is valuable to some users. The auto-detection of IP address feature currently only works in specific cases (as discussed in this thread, it currently doesn't work when you're behind NAT, which is usually), but more importantly, we need to stop supporting that feature in order to be able to do other, more important things. Unfortunately, we don't have the time and mental bandwidth to support that feature as well as the Tor/I2P additions, and we also don't have the time and mental bandwidth to revisit that decision at this point. I want to thank Paul Rabahy for his long history of contributions to the project: operating the test grid, participating in chats, helping others with questions on the mailing list, and providing user feedback. It is very valuable to know what features are being used and how important those features are to people. Even though I'm not going to revisit the decision to deprecate the auto-detection-of-IP-address feature, I think it is very valuable to know *just how much it hurts* to lose the functionality, because for one thing we might be able to put it back in a better way in the future, possibly even by leveraging the new Tor functionality… Regards, Zooko P.S. For archaeologists who want to delve into the history, here is a post I wrote three years ago suggesting that we were occupying an "uncanny valley" of half-assed peer-to-peer and that we should head toward full-assed peer-to-peer or full-assed client-server: https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2012-July/007533.html But, the reason we're making this change today is not primarily because of that argument, but primarily because David needs a clear and committed design direction so that he can drive forward on implementing Tor integration, and Brian is driving this design, and Brian decided, after exploring quite a wide spread of engineering and usability trade-offs, to go for this design. So it is actually mostly Brian's decision, and I'm putting my weight behind it in this email in large part just because I think it is good for the project is Brian feels like he can make decisions, and they stick, and he doesn't have to spend *too* much time arguing for them. (Although he is certainly always diligent about posting justifications for such decisions.) _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list [email protected] https://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
