[tahoe-dev] v1.7 progress report (beta release on Thursday!)

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Folks:

We've made a lot of progress on our goals for v1.7. We intend to
release a beta on Thursday. This beta release will be have all of the
features that we intend to release in v1.7 and will not have any known
regressions or critical bugs. Then we'll give ourselves ten days to
test it out on various real-world deployments and look for surprises
or regressions before calling it "v1.7" final on May 23. The next day,
May 24, is the end of Google Summer of Code Community Bonding Period
[1] and is also the day I fly to Poland to present Tahoe-LAFS at
CONfidence 2010 [2].

Brian has made a lot of progress on his new downloader (#798) but it
won't be quite ready in time for v1.7, so we've removed that one from
the list of features intended for v1.7.

We really need help from a volunteer! François has put a lot of work
into making Tahoe-LAFS handle the local character encoding in both
filenames and command-line arguments, but we need someone to review
his patches so that they can be committed to trunk in time for v1.7. I
originally said that I would do that, but I have to finish reviewing
Kevan's Servers-of-Happiness patches, and fix some packaging/build
issues, so we need help from someone else!

The SFTP front-end is a major new feature that I'm excited about. If
it works as intended, it will allow people to use Tahoe-LAFS through
familiar user interfaces such as ftp clients, Gnome and KDE file
managers, etc.. I'm not sure if the Mac OS X Finder can use SFTP. We
need volunteers to try out the SFTP support in their favorite file
manager.

Ed Pimentl's offer of a bounty of $800:
http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-February/003802.html

Jack Lloyd's offer of a bounty of $150:
http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-February/003807.html

David-Sarah's request for clarification of what qualifies to earn the bounty:
http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-March/004053.html

Here are the new features planned for v1.7:

 * servers of happiness (#778)
 * SFTP front-end (#531, #645, #941)
 * support different character encodings (#534, #565, #629, #734)
 * make the build/install work better on Windows, Windows-64-bit and
on the latest Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2010/timeline
[2] http://2010.confidence.org.pl/prelegenci/zooko-wilcox-ohearn

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531# SFTP frontend needs tests
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534# CLI (e.g. tahoe cp)
does not correctly handle or display Unicode file/directory names,
either in arguments or the local filesystem
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565# unicode arguments on
the command-line
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/629# 'tahoe backup'
doesn't tolerate 8-bit filenames
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645# connecting to sftp
frontend using sshfs fails from linux client
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/734# Tahoe CLI with
unicode patches applied fails when stdout is redirected
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778# "shares of
happiness" is the wrong measure; "servers of happiness" is better
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798# improve
random-access download to retrieve/decrypt less data
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/941# SFTP frontend fails
when listing a directory containing a mutable file, because it relies
on node.get_size() to be an integer