[tahoe-dev] release plan for tahoe v0.7.0 -- ASAP

[zooko]

Folks:

Brian did an amazing job of implementing Small Distributed Mutable  
Files and distributed directories over the last two weeks.  As  
always, you can learn all the details from the Trac Timeline [1].

Small Distributed Mutable Files are used to make distributed  
directories.

Now we have a version of tahoe in which both files and directories  
are robustly erasure-coded across multiple servers!  This is very  
exciting!

However this new feature was produced in a big hurry in order to make  
it demo-able at the conference that Brian attended last weekend, and  
it isn't nearly as complete as our normal development process.  For  
example, it isn't very well unit-tested, as indicated by the  
increasing number of lines of code Uncovered [2].  For another  
example, the old-style directories (which are stored on only a single  
server, and which are vulnerable to being illicitly changed by that  
server if the server is granted read-only access to them), are still  
present in the source code (see how there are both "dirnode.py" and  
"dirnode2.py" files [3]).

We also have some important documentation and packaging work needed  
if we want Tahoe to be accessible to more people, as demonstrated by  
Arch's bug reports [5] about the install process and Norm Hardy's  
thoughtful message [6] about the lack of claims about what Tahoe is  
supposed to achieve.

Despite these flaws, I think that we should go ahead and release  
Tahoe v0.7.0 As Soon As Possible, and plan to release a Tahoe v0.7.1  
soon thereafter with more polish on it.

My reasons are that we haven't put out a release since v0.6.1 one  
month ago -- October 15 (see the Roadmap including history [4]), and  
I don't like for more than four weeks to go bye between releases.  We  
planned and announced that we intended to have a new release out by  
last week.  The current trunk has several important improvements over  
the v0.6.1 release, including the fix to the aforementioned security  
problem involving directory servers.

So, I'll write up release notes, and let's look for critical issues  
which would really make v0.7.0 worse than v0.6.1.  Assuming there  
aren't any substantial ones, I expect to announce v0.7.0 tomorrow  
morning so that we can move on with other work.

Here is the Roadmap Milestone which shows what we still need to do  
for v0.7.0: [7].

And here is the Milestone for v0.7.1: [8].

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/timeline
[2] http://allmydata.org/tahoe-figleaf-graph/hanford.allmydata.com- 
tahoe_figleaf2.html
[3] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/src/allmydata
[4] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/roadmap?show=all
[5] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/search? 
q=arch_o_median&noquickjump=1&ticket=on
[6] http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2007-November/000222.html
[7] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/milestone/0.7.0
[8] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/milestone/0.7.1