Tahoe-LAFS 1.12.0 alpha1 tagged: please test

[Brian Warner]

I just tagged git revision 272f032b6200be3981b15391e1bdcc0cebae24f8 as
the first alpha for the upcoming 1.12 release. The tarball is available
as "tahoe-lafs-1.12.0a1.tar.gz" in the usual place:

 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/tarballs/

and the git tag is signed with the tahoe release key:

 pub  2048R/68666A7A 2012-01-12
      Key fingerprint = E34E 62D0 6D0E 69CF CA41  79FF BDE0 D31D 6866 6A7A
 uid  Tahoe-LAFS Release-Signing Key (https://tahoe-lafs.org)
 sub  2048R/AEB47DBB 2012-01-12

We have more work to go before the release is ready, but all the major
pieces are in place: magic-folders, --listen=tor (with automatic
onion-address allocation and tor-launching), and the server cleanups
like --hostname= instead of automatic IP-address detection.

We're working on the following remaining items:

* improve the Welcome Page "grid status" display to show connection
  errors and successful connection hints, instead of the current
  placeholders
* maybe add automatic --listen=i2p support
* improve error messages if --hide-ip is used but tor/i2p are not
  available
* docs improvements, especially the NEWS file

I'd like to encourage everyone who has an interest in Tor or I2P to give
this release a spin, and tell us if you see any problems in the new
support.
http://tahoe-lafs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/anonymity-configuration.html
is a good place to start, but basically you can make a hidden storage
server with "tahoe create-node --hide-ip --listen=tor" and it will
allocate an onion-service address, and only make outbound connections
via Tor. Clients can be built with "tahoe create-client --hide-ip" and
it will automatically use tor for any TCP hints it receives. All nodes,
even without "--hide-ip", will use Tor for any Tor hints they receive
(assuming they can reach a Tor daemon in the usual places). Same for
I2P.

Also, I'd like our packaging folks (Debian, Docker, etc) to take a look
at the tarball and see if we need to change anything to help them get
the final release into those distributions quickly. We've probably added
a few small dependencies, but there shouldn't be any major changes to
deal with.

I'm hoping we can get the rest of the work done in the next week, and
either have a beta for the Tahoe Summit (November 8+9th), or maybe even
a final release.

cheers,
 -Brian