mini-Summit report, day 1

[Brian Warner]

Quick summary of the first day: Brian, Daira, Nathan, and Tony Arcieri
met up in a bar/coffee-shop from 6-10pm. We talked about:

* Accounting: Once we ship 1.11, we can land the "leasedb" branch,
  followed by the "cloud backend" branch currently in use by Least
  Authority. We could then cut a 1.12 release immediately, and servers
  would then get leases stored in the database, with both Starter and
  Anonymous "accounts" owning these leases. The next steps after that
  would be: client pubkeys, furlification (to access non-anonymous
  accounts), account states (enabled/frozen/disabled), account API
  (space-used, lease reconciliation/mass-expiry, eventually payment),
  server-side account control panel, client-side server-selection
  control panel

* Replacing the write-enabler: we tried (and failed) to reconstruct the
  protocol developed at the previous(*2?) Summit to safely transition
  from shared-secret-based write-enablers to pubkey-based ones. Reminded
  ourselves of the potential approaches (signed mutable request
  messages, unsigned requests but server verifies entire shares),
  debated whether to move piecemeal towards removing Foolscap or to make
  one big leap.

* discussed grid identifiers, how/why to participate in multiple grids
  at the same time, how to tolerate non-overlap between uploader's
  desired servers and downloader's known servers. Daira had an idea to
  describe a grid as a mutable file stored in a (single/global)
  "meta"/"super" grid, containing contact info for all its servers. The
  gridid is then the readcap for this file. Brian described his
  "storage-club" idea from a few years ago
  (https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2011-February/006159.html)

* Went over a diagram of related/dependent tasks from the previous
  Summit: explicit server selection, new encoding formats, web control
  panels, grid management.

* Brian demoed Petmail, walked through the message-wrapping layers,
  explained the invitation process and UI.

* We discussed Rust, Noether, and type systems.


We're meeting up again tomorrow, 6pm, at the Mission Creek coffee shop,
968 Valencia, because it's quieter than the bar. Join us!

cheers,
 -Brian