[tahoe-dev] announcing a very boring Tahoe-LAFS Hacking Weekend -- starting this Friday!

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

Folks:

Do you love banging out new features in record time?  Performance  
optimizations?  Radical code refactorings?  How about fixing deep,  
tricky bugs at the last minute before a new release?

Then there will be nothing at all fun for you to do at the next  
*Tahoe-LAFS Hacking Weekend*!

This coming weekend, starting Friday afternoon, we will either  
already have fixed the three critical issues that remain (#778, #833,  
#893) or we will deem them to be "known issues" for the upcoming  
Tahoe-LAFS v1.6 release.  So there will be no new, disruptive code  
changes committed to trunk.  Tahoe-LAFS v1.6 is going to offer the  
most stable, reliable, secure distributed storage ever, and it will  
come with a couple of major new features and many improvements to  
usability and documentation.  We're going to make the final v1.6  
release next week and then immediately try to get it included into  
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

So, if you want to write disruptive code changes, anything you do  
will have to wait til after the v1.6 release.

However if your tastes run toward any of the following activities,  
then you might like to join us this weekend:

* documentation -- improve the user docs, developer docs, wiki, help  
text, UI text

* manual testing -- upload and download files, share them with your  
friends, destroy hard drives with weaponry

* automated testing -- write unit tests, win plaudits from your peers

* packaging -- get Tahoe-LAFS compiled and packaged for your favorite  
operating system or packaging tool

* publicity -- write a post about Tahoe-LAFS in your favorite user  
group newsletter or bulletin board system

* code review -- study Brian's patches and learn software engineering  
from a master

* RelatedProjects -- there are a ton of great hacks that build on top  
of Tahoe-LAFS or integrate Tahoe-LAFS with other tools.  See http:// 
allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/RelatedProjects for a full list, but  
they include fuse, Hadoop, Android, bzr, TiddlyWiki and more. Join us  
and play with or hack on some of those!

You can find us on the #tahoe-lafs channel on irc.freenode.net, or  
just communicate through trac and mailing list, as appropriate.

By the way, the Tahoe-LAFS Hacking Weekend last weekend was a blast.   
We had half-a-dozen people actively working on the project and  
helping each other out.  Join us!  :-)

Regards,

Zooko

http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/778#"shares of happiness" is  
the wrong measure; "servers of happiness" is better
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/833#reject mutable children  
when *reading* an immutable dirnode
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/893#UCWE when mapupdate gives  
up too early, then server errors require replacement servers