[tahoe-dev] 1.9 plan: alpha1 coming monday!

[Brian Warner]

Hi everyone.. just wanted to give an update on the progress of 1.9.

MDMF has been taking longer than we expected to review and land..
there's a lot of code! But we're planning to land it tomorrow, because:

 * we've committed to having MDMF in 1.9 (i.e. we'll delay 1.9 as
   necessary to get MDMF ready)
 * MDMF will be opt-in for 1.9 (so MDMF-specific problems will only
   affect folks who explicitly enable MDMF)

So we can afford to land MDMF before completing a detailed review as
long as we're comfortable it's not going to cause any regressions (e.g.
break SDMF downloads, which share code paths with MDMF). We still want
to finish that review before we *release* the code, but we've got the
next few weeks for that. And by having it on trunk, it'll be easier for
folks to test.

So here's the plan:

 * spend the next 24 hours testing the MDMF-2 branch[1] and studying the
   code to look for regressions or other problems in SDMF and normal
   operations
 * land MDMF-2 on trunk tomorrow night (sunday aug-21, probably around
   10pm pacific when I get back from the Cotati Accordion Festival[2])
 * on monday, we make an "alpha1" release, so people can test from a
   tarball instead of a darcs checkout
 * spend the next week improving the MDMF code: there are some tools
   that need updating (like 'tahoe debug dump-cap'), and some
   code-coverage work to do
 * next weekend, if we're comfortable with the state of MDMF, we try for
   a beta1 release. After that, we'll only make code changes to fix
   serious regressions. Then we focus on docs and testing.
 * I'd like to get two or three weeks of beta testing before a final
   release. This suggests the final 1.9 should come out around
   mid-september.

Onwards!
 -Brian



[1]: http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/ticket393-MDMF-2
[2]: http://www.cotatifest.com/