[tahoe-dev] calling all volunteers! It's time to create Tahoe-LAFS v1.7.1!

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Folks:

Brian is well along in writing his new downloader code. The new design
is expected to improve correctness and performance in all reasonable
cases, but of course any large change to the code base carries the
risk of introducing new bugs or accidentally penalizing performance
for some cases.

Therefore I would like to release Tahoe-LAFS v1.7.1, featuring a lot
of packaging work, before Brian is ready to commit the new downloader
code. Then whatever other improvements go into trunk after Brian's new
download code is stabilized can be released as Tahoe-LAFS v1.8.0.

Let's plan to review Brian's new downloader patches and to release
Tahoe-LAFS v1.7.1 by the 18th of July. We'll release Tahoe-LAFS
v1.7.1, and then we'll commit Brian's new downloader to trunk.

We learned from Tahoe-LAFS v1.7.0 that there is a lot of desire for
Tahoe-LAFS to be easier to deploy and a lot of desire for it to work
smoothly on more platforms. Fortunately, we also learned that there
are a lot of people who are willing to help!

We have a well-defined process for this sort of development: first of
all we get a buildslave (operated by a volunteer) which will
demonstrate how well our code is working on that platform (see
http://tahoe-lafs.org/buildbot ). Then we open a ticket for each
specific issue (see below for example tickets and see The Roadmap
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/roadmap for the full set). Then
someone fixes it, someone else reviews the patch to make sure it
has unit tests, and we commit it to trunk and close the ticket.

We need volunteers! I would like to appoint a Platform Master for
each platform who will look after the tickets that are slated for
v1.7.1 and affect that platform. This person's job will not be to
manually test on their platform—that's what the buildslaves are for.
Instead their job will be to make sure the buildslaves are running,
make sure tickets which are important to users of their platform get
priority, and make sure that the patches that people contribute get
reviewed and applied. The appointment is temporary—once Tahoe-LAFS
v1.7.1 is released then you are immediately relieved of duty as
Platform Master.

I will continue to perform the role of Release Manager. One of the
jobs of the Release Manager is to accept patches which are contributed
too late in the release cycle, thank the contributors for their
patches, and then save them aside to be committed into the *next*
release cycle. :-)

The platforms that need a Platform Master to shepherd them for this
release are: "Windows", "Debian/Ubuntu", "Fedora", "Mac", "*BSD",
"Solaris", and "NixOS". Why do we choose that set of platforms?
Because those are all the platforms that somebody cared enough about
to volunteer a working buildslave.

Note that some of these categories (especially "*BSD") are rather
broad and encompass many operating systems, versions, and variants.
That's okay! You don't have to have a running install of every
variant, you just have to care enough to read the relevant tickets and
mailing list traffic and either read all the relevant patches or
delegate to someone else to do so.

Please sign up to be Platform Master for your favorite platform by
replying to this email. :-)

Don't delay, folks! We have three weekends to chew through as many of
these small packaging, doc, and usability tickets as we can. The final
weekend of those three is probably going to be mostly about me
shunting tickets out of 1.7.1 and into 1.8.0, so you really only have
two weekends to get some good fixes in. Start by making sure your
buildslaves are healthy.

Regards,

Zooko

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923# setting flogtool
FLOG* environment variables causes spurious test failures
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/953# dependency on
pycrypto needs to be tested and supported
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1065# provide binary eggs
of PyCrypto for our supported platforms
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067# Storage Servers
version is 0 on Welcome page
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074# get rid of tahoe.exe launcher
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1093# win32 build hell
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098# Support for FreeBSD
> 6 is missing from iputil.py
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099# stdout might not
have an 'encoding' attribute