Weekly Meeting

There is a weekly conference call using ​Google Hangout. The agenda is set prior to each meeting and is focused on topics directly relevant to Tahoe-LAFS development. The connection URL is posted on this page and IRC a few minutes before the meeting.

Who	Core developers or interested community members
What	Dev Topics Meeting
When	Thursdays 16:00Z* (8:00am Pacific) (NOTE: time has changed (again). Previously, it was 16:30Z)
Where	Google Hangout, IRC fallback (see below)
Why	Voice/video interaction complements IRC/mailing list
How	See Agenda below

(*) Z (Zulu) time refers to UTC; ​check where you are or see ​countdown.

Etiquette

• It's okay to talk about things not on the pre-arranged agenda. (But it helps to announce in advance if you know there's something you'll want to talk about! It encourages other interested people to prepare and helps them avoid accidentally missing a meeting that they really would have wanted to attend.)
• Participants may have high latency; if you'd like to speak, say "turn" or raise your hand and wait for silence.
• Use IRC for textual chat *not* the hangout chat feature.

Agenda

URL:

Upcoming: 2012-11-15

This will be a TESLA COILS AND CORPSES meeting: science, big new features, writing papers about our work, etc. If you're more into NUTS AND BOLTS then stay tuned for a future meeting about engineering, debugging, making stable releases, etc.

Agenda: async notifications

What a lot of people really want is an alternative to Dropbox — something that functions very like Dropbox but without exposing your plaintext to spying and corruption. David-Sarah implemented a part of this with the drop-upload feature. It seems to me that the blocker which prevents Tahoe-LAFS from doing the rest of it is that LAFS clients have no way to get an asynchronous notification that a file has changed (i.e., so that they don't have to poll to find out if the file has changed). So: could we add that? Why not just define a remote interface offered by LAFS clients to LAFS servers. The remove interface is "hey_you_this_file_has_changed(storageindex)".

Another approach would be to embrace a standard mechanism like PubSubHubBub. That might help with our long-term goal of moving from foolscap to HTTP, and it might let us benefit from the work others do on issues around this such as DoS and scalability.

Proposed Future Topics

• Tahoe-LAFS v1.10 What can we do to move Tahoe-LAFS v1.10 along? Is David-Sarah too busy with LeastAuthority.com to be Release Manager for Tahoe-LAFS v1.10? Should Tahoe-LAFS v1.10 contain only patches that are already on trunk?

• Proof-of-Retrievability review of a paper draft Zooko will distribute. (was scheduled: 2012-10-30)

• Rainhill design review which David-Sarah will distribute; call for outside crypto expert reviewers. (was scheduled: 2012-11-06)

Notes / Archives

2012-11-08

• #1240; Is it done? (I think it still needs fixed tests.) Can we commit it to trunk and be done with it? Do we need to merge it with #1679?
• #1679; Let's write a test for it! Has The Dod had continuous good service since he applied the patch? Has nejucomo tried reproducing his bug and applying the patch?

2012-11-01

Garbage collection: use cases and protocols;

• #1832 (support indefinite leases with garbage collection)
• #1833 (storage server deletes garbage shares itself instead of waiting for crawler to notice them)
• #1834 (stop using share crawler for anything except constructing a leasedb)
• #1835 (stop grovelling the whole storage backend looking for externally-added shares to add a lease to)
• #1836 (use leasedb (not crawler) to figure out how many shares you have and how many bytes)
• #1837 (remove the "override lease duration" feature)

And the associated mailing list thread.

2012-10-23

Topics: Ticket #1240, Tahoe-LAFS birthday party, future agendas.

Attendees: Zooko, David-Sarah, amiller, ambimorph, nejucomo.

Concise summary:

• #1240 debug session - Incorrect caching logic suspected.
• Tahoe-LAFS birthday party - Saturday, 2012-10-27 at 23:00z - Each locale connects with a projector + google hangout.
• Future agendas - next week, Proof of Retrievability paper review; two weeks out, Rainhill review with outside crypto reviewers.

Finely detailed notes in MeetingNotes_2012_10_23

2012-10-16

Topics: Proof-of-Retrievability

Attendees: Zooko, David-Sarah, nejucomo

From IRC, Zooko summarizes (edited for spelling):

1. "The reason we can do better than the previous state of the art is that we've expanded the setting to multiple servers and multiple clients, which opens up new defenses for the good guys against Ponda Baba."
2. "It is useful way to think, to start with the completely safe camouflaged download protocol: just run your normal verifier, but tell it to save what it gets, and then to talk about how to make it faster without breaking camouflage."
3. "There are two dimensions of how you might be able to make it faster: the dimension of multiple downloader/verifiers and the dimension of multiple servers."