user of tahoe client thinks "storage=true" means that their client can use storage

[zooko]

My wife (who, by the way, is super smart and knowledgeable) is setting up a tahoe client. From her perspective what she is doing has nothing to do with servers. She may or may not be aware that the same source code and configuration file is used for servers as is used for clients. In any case her only goal was to set up a client so she would have been justified in skipping over any documentation that appeared to be about setting up servers.

So, when she was editing tahoe.cfg, she saw helper=False and storage=False and, since she thought that she was configuring a client, she thought she ought to turn those two settings on, because the only interpretation of those settings was whether this client can use those services.

Possible fix would be to add comments in the default tahoe.cfg file, such as a line next to helper=False saying # Shall this node run a helper service that clients can use?. Also, maybe big visible separators delineating which configuration options are about clients and which are about servers.

A larger fix might be to split the client-related and server-related configuration into two separate files, possibly named ~/.tahoe/client.cfg and ~/.tahoe/server.cfg.

(Tahoe-LAFS grew out of the P2P tradition and we often thought of a single "node" performing both client and server behavior. But in practice nowadays that is a very rare way to use it. Note that I'm not proposing that we make it impossible for a single node to do both! I'm only proposing that the terminology, docs, and configuration files assume that one node is going to perform only one of those roles, the better to match user assumptions and common usage.)

[davidsarah]

create_node.py: add comments to default tahoe.cfg to clarify the meaning of each section. refs #1311

[davidsarah]

Replying to zooko:

A larger fix might be to split the client-related and server-related configuration into two separate files, possibly named ~/.tahoe/client.cfg and ~/.tahoe/server.cfg.

-1, this would cause disruption and multiple places to set the same options (since we would have to support existing tahoe.cfg files in addition to any new ones).

[sorry, edited the Description field by mistake in the last comment]