[tahoe-dev] should we work on critical bugs or fix easy stuff? :-) Re: what should we work on at the Boulder Hack Fest?

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

Yes, I too think the biggest issues right now have to do with
mutables. In addition to the long-standing issue that repair
increments the version number (#1209), there are several major bugs in
mutables, especially MDMFs, but also regressions in SDMF mutables:

https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?status=!closed&type=defect&component=code-mutable&group=priority

Kevan has been working on these and for some of them has posted
patches for people to test whether the patches fix the problems they
see.

A couple of weeks ago I spent a plane flight (about 3 hours) reading
through the mutable code to refresh my understanding of it, but I had
barely begun getting all back in my head when the plane landed. :-) I
hope to make time to do that again soon. I have a lot of notes from
the flight.

Anyway, as far as what's most important for making a new release of
Tahoe-LAFS that the most people can rely on, fixing and auditing
mutables is probably the most important! You can see that I've
signalled that by marking those tickets as "Priority: critical" if you
view all tickets sorted by their Priority:

https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?status=!closed&group=priority

However, my assumption was that for this weekend's Hack Fest, it would
take too much time to get anyone trained up on the theory of mutables
well enough that they could start reviewing Kevan's fix-it patches,
reading the code in search of other bugs, or writing tests or patches
for the known bugs. I figured the thing most likely to reach
completion in one weekend is code review of smaller patches for
simpler issues, or writing unit tests for simple issues.

Maybe this is wrong! Maybe diving in by reading a bug description (on
a ticket) and a patch by Kevan that fixes that bug is the fastest way
to become an expert.

I think I'll try to suss out what motivates the attendees at the Hack
Fest. If you show up (on IRC, or in person in Boulder), and you're
awfully keen to fix a certain issue, then I'll try to help you do
that.

Regards,

Zooko

https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1209# repair of mutable
files/directories should not increment the sequence number