[tahoe-dev] brief high-level instructions regarding development process changes in the Tahoe-LAFS project

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Dear Everyone:

Please feel free to jump in with your ideas and preferences. I want to
have an easy and encouraging process that lots of people can
contribute to, especially Brian Warner. Even though I hate using git,
and I'm hoping to settle on some intermediate stage (at least
temporarily) where I can continue to use darcs.

*BUT*

Tahoe-LAFS v1.8.1 is due in 12 days.

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/roadmap

Brian has fixed the deepest regression (#1223) and his fix needs
code-review. François has fixed a unicode bug (#1224) and his fix also
needs code-review. The third of three open tickets, #1212, still needs
for us to decide what would be acceptable to users.

Finally, we intend to make Tahoe-LAFS v1.8.1 install cleanly for more
users. This is probably mostly a matter of building binary eggs of
pycryptopp, PyCrypto, zfec, pyOpenSSL, and Twisted for all supported
platforms. This is a labor-intensive process and we need your help. I
don't know for sure yet, but I assume that the user installation
problems that Myckel reported [1] would have been fixed if we supplied
those binary packages. (This is, by the way, something that I don't
think Brian's unsuck branch fixes and in fact I suspect it currently
makes it worse.)

What to do:

1. Review the patches in #1223 or #1224, or figure out exactly what
sort of behavior is acceptable/desirable for #1212.

2. Build binary packages for your favorite operating system. You just
get the source tree of that package and run "python setup.py
bdist_egg" and you are done.

3. Help me write a deterministic test of #1190 (probably talk to me on
IRC -- I could use help).

4. If you are a packager who integrates open source software into
operating systems like Debian, Fedora, the NetBSD ports collection,
NixOS, etc., then do *not* let the noise and excitement deter you from
packaging Tahoe-LAFS. Tahoe-LAFS is perfectly packageable today (it is
included in Ubuntu for example), and there is no reason to make your
users wait for the dust to settle. We will help.

In short: by all means keep planning disruptive new improvements to
our development processes, but do not let this distract you from
making Tahoe-LAFS v1.8.1 a very high-quality and very widely-deployed
release!

Thanks,

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn


http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190# we can end up
importing the wrong version of a dependency even though the right one
is "already the active version in easy-install.pth"
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212# Repairing fails if
less than 7 servers available
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223# got
'WrongSegmentError' during repair
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224# Unicode bug in grid
to grid copies

[1] http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-October/005422.html