[tahoe-announce] Tahoe-LAFS v1.8.1 release candidate ready for testing, plus: please tell me your story

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Folks:

The code that will become Tahoe-LAFS v1.8.1 is ready for user testing.
There are a number of bugfixes plus one performance improvement:

 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading
some shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
v1.8.0. (#1212)

 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
file/directory operations. (#1045)

 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special cases.
(#1223)

 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
involving a non-ASCII filename. (#1224)

 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to
the console on Windows. (#1232)


To test, please run "darcs get --lazy
http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/trunk tahoe-lafs" or download
a tarball of 1.8.0-r4803 or newer, e.g.:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/tarballs/allmydata-tahoe-1.8.0-r4803.tar.bz2

We want to get feedback from users to confirm that this release
candidate for 1.8.1 doesn't introduce any regressions (compared to
1.8.0 or 1.7.1), and that if you had any of the issues mentioned above
that this release candidate fixes it.

The performance improvement (ticket #1223) should be more noticeable
with larger values of K (number of shares needed). Recently the
recommended best practice [1] has shifted from setting K=3 to setting
K equal to a fraction of N and setting N to be proportional to the
number of servers on your grid, so if you have a large grid of servers
then this performance improvement from 1.8.0 to 1.8.1 may be more
important to you. Please test and report!

(Note: before the final 1.8.1 release we may yet tweak the build
system to make it easier to install -- ticket #1233 -- but this won't
change any of the behavior listed above so you can go ahead and test
and report now.)


Also, I'm conducting an informal survey to learn how people are using
Tahoe-LAFS in practice. If you have either deployed Tahoe-LAFS and
relied on it for something or else attempted to do so and gave up, I
would love to hear from you. Either write to tahoe-dev at tahoe-lafs.org
or to me personally and we'll ask you what you use Tahoe-LAFS for or
intended to use it for and how well it serves you. I will collect all
such user stories (optionally anonymizing them if you so request) and
summarize them on a page on our wiki.


Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-September/005247.html