July 2nd nuts & bolts meeting notes

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

And Brian!  Brian was there. :)

On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 1:01 PM Jean-Paul Calderone <
jean-paul+tahoe-dev at leastauthority.com> wrote:

> Attended by:
> Jessie, Liz, Chris, Meejah, Ram, Anand, Jean-Paul
>
> Discussion today was focused on the Python 3 porting effort.  Assume that
> as the context in reading the notes, I mostly didn't bother to include that
> detail inline.
>
> * Meet once a week as a larger group
> * Stand up twice a week to keep everyone unblocked, maybe with fewer
> people
> * Dependencies need porting
>  * Foolscap
>    * Network layer for Tahoe-LAFS
>    * Brian started a port months ago but ran out of time
>    * Old plan was to add alternate protocol (HTTP) and allow us to skip
> Foolscap port
>    * New plan is to port Foolscap because the alternate protocol will take
> too long
>    * Brian suggests
>      * we port Foolscap as part of the Tahoe-LAFS port
>      * be ruthless about deleting features that aren't needed (so as to
> avoid porting them)
>        * eg storage features, schema features
>    * The trick is to make sure the wire protocol is compatible
>      * eg every API specifies whether it takes bytes or unicode
>      * Python 2 and Python 3 must agree on this
>    * We could look at everything and decide what the ideal outcome for
> Python 3 usage would be
>    * We could just say the Python 2 behavior is canonical and replicate
> this exactly on Python 3
>    * Method names are most naturally the "native string" type
>      * ... but there is no type that corresponds to this so relying on it
> complicates porting effort
>    * Brian's wild estimate (on request) is 2 weeks
>  * Nevow
>    * How maintained is it?
>    * twisted.web has all of the templating features
>    * look at twisted.web and see if it does everything we are using/need
> from nevow
>    * port to twisted.web and drop nevow if it seems feasible
>  * pycryptopp
>    * not worth porting to python3
>    * tahoe-lafs switching to "cryptography" library to remove pycryptopp
> dependency
>    * Current state is that a few review comments still need to be
> addressed
>  * txsocksx
>    * Brian suggests dropping this
>    * Also dropping i2p
>    * Anand did port txsocksx but it hasn't been merged
>    * txtorcon has built-in SOCKS support that is Python 3 compatible
>  * i2p
>    * don't port it
>    * let str4d port it
> * Tahoe-LAFS itself
>  * a big task is identifying what all of the native strings are - bytes or
> unicode?
>  * consider deleting all of the Foolscap schema stuff from Tahoe-LAFS
>    * it's a nice idea
>    * it blocks useful/correct protocol upgrades
>    * it generally doesn't catch real problems
>    * it's more stuff in Foolscap that has to be ported
> * Next steps are to identify all the unported dependencies and port them
>  * Add list of unported dependencies to the Python 3 milestone
>    * https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/milestone/Support%20Python%203
>  * Foolscap
>  * Look at and decide what to do about Nevow
> * Anand is interested in looking at doing the Foolscap port
>  * Who has Foolscap commit access?
>  * What is the Foolscap development process?
>  * Who will review PRs?
>  * Proposal:
>    * Fork Foolscap
>    * Create an integration branch
>    * Create small porting branches and make PRs against the integration
> branch
>    * Eventually merge a completed port from the integration branch into
> upstream master
>  * Question for warner:
>    * Please give Anand and ??? commit access to Foolscap
>    * Does someone else need mailman admin access?
>  * Action:
>    * Anand will investigate porting effort
>      * Figure out a plan for incremental porting effort
>    * Send out an update in a few days
>    * Updates to tahoe-dev mailing list -
> https://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
>      * note: email is hard, messages often go to spam or don't get
> delivered
> * Laaaater:
>  * Fix delivery/reliability issues on tahoe-dev mailing list somehow
> * Other
>  * Re-establish weekly nuts&bolts
>  * Send out meeting notes to the mailing list
>  * Keep communication public by default
>  * Use the irc channel and the mailing list
>
>
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