| 21 | | Difficulty: medium - hard |
| 22 | | |
| 23 | | When uploading a file to a grid, Tahoe-LAFS will make sure that the file is |
| 24 | | healthy (a good discussion of what healthy means is found in #778) before |
| 25 | | reporting that the file is uploaded successfully. Tools to effectively |
| 26 | | maintain file health (or to adapt to new definitions of health) aren't |
| 27 | | quite complete, however -- our users have had several use cases that aren't |
| 28 | | easily addressed with what we have. Students taking this project would be |
| 29 | | building tools to address those use cases. |
| 30 | | |
| 31 | | A good starting point would be to become familiar with how files are placed on |
| 32 | | a grid. [http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/docs/architecture.txt architecture.txt], |
| 33 | | [http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/docs/specifications/file-encoding.txt file-encoding.txt], |
| 34 | | [http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/docs/specifications/mutable.txt mutable.txt], |
| 35 | | [http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/src/allmydata/immutable/upload.py the immutable file upload code], and |
| 36 | | [http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/src/allmydata/mutable/publish.py the mutable file upload code] are good |
| 37 | | places to do that. Also, you might want to look at the |
| 38 | | [http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/src/allmydata/storage/server.py storage server code] to understand that |
| 39 | | better. Some good tickets to start looking at are #699, #543, and #232; you'll |
| 40 | | find that those link to other tickets. |
| 41 | | |
| 42 | | There are many ways to help address these issues. Some ideas: |
| 43 | | |
| 44 | | * Alter the CLI and the WUI to give users the ability to rebalance |
| 45 | | files that they've uploaded already. (#699) |
| 46 | | * Build tools that allow node administrators to moves shares around |
| 47 | | a grid (#543, #864) |
| 48 | | * Alter Tahoe-LAFS to rebalance mutable files when uploading a new version |
| 49 | | of them. (#232) |
| 50 | | |
| 51 | | (it is doubtful that any one of these projects is enough to fill a summer, but, combined, they would be a big usability improvement for Tahoe-LAFS) |
| 52 | | |
| 53 | | Depending on how you address this, this is tightly integrated with ideas of |
| 54 | | file health and accounting, so prospective students would do well to explore |
| 55 | | those open issues, too. A good accounting jumping-off point is #666. A good |
| 56 | | jumping-off point for health is #778. |
