[tahoe-dev] Calling all users! Try out v1.7 beta this weekend!

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Folks:

We intend to release v1.7 on May 13. This gives us only two weekends
to finish these features!

1. Servers of Happiness (Kevan) #778
2. New Downloader (Brian, David-Sarah) #288, #448, #798, #800, #809, #990, #993
3. SFTP (David-Sarah) #531, #645, #941
4. Support Different Character Encodings (François) [query for unicode tickets]
5. usability issues (David-Sarah) [query for davidsarah tickets]
6. packaging issues (Zooko) #668, #803

Fortunately, the dev team has patches ready for user testing. Kevan
has a probably-complete patch for Servers of Happiness, Brian has a
partially working patch for new Downloader, David-Sarah has a
possibly-complete patch for a tested and supported SFTP interface, and
François has a partially (?) working patch for different character
encodings.

Please help us out by joining us on IRC this weekend, applying the
patches, and testing out the new goodness that will become Tahoe-LAFS
v1.7. In particular David-Sarah has mentioned that we need to test
lots of different SFTP clients (including operating system file
browsers like Nautilus and Mac OS X Finder). Also I'm very curious to
see how Brian's New Downloader performs. (I suspect that Tahoe-LAFS is
better than BitTorrent for downloading large files or viewing movies.
Except, of course, that it is only useful for downloading large files
or viewing movies stored on your personal grid or your friendnet grid
or your corporate-backed storage grid -- it isn't useful for
downloading large files or viewing movies being swapped by millions of
strangers.)

Regards,

Zooko