First alpha tagged: 1.11.0a1

Brian Warner announced the first alpha release of 1.11.0. The main feature of this release is the use of pip to install Tahoe. Please test early and often.

State of donations, new bitcoin address

In a tale that must be read to be believed, Brian described the rather harrowing tale of Tahoe-LAFS' bitcoins. Please see here if you would like to donate to Tahoe-LAFS.

Packaging/release updates

The close of #1582 marks the end of an era. The new scheme is just plain tox. Everything installs with pip. Run it in a virtualenv. Brian detailed the remaining issues with the build slaves. We wil need to resolve these issues before the release.

Rightscon

Patrick will be at Rightscon next week. Please drop him a line and say hi. He would love to hear what you like about TWN, what new things you would like to see added, and how you are using Tahoe-LAFS.

Friday, 03/18

We raised the setuptools dependency from 0.6, because Daira had an old environment with some ancient version (0.9.8), and something wanted a less-ancient one (>=1.0), but somehow it failed to update properly. I raised it to 20.3, since that's the latest version, but Daira pointed out that that might make things difficult for packagers, especially Debian/Ubuntu releases that have an older one. We don't actually need much out of setuptools for running Tahoe. We settled on ">=11.3", since the "cryptography" package wants that too (so there's no point in allowing anything older than that). Debian/jesse (via backports), Debian/stretch, and Ubuntu/vivid all meet this. Ubuntu/trusty (aka 14.04 LTS, the most recent LTS until 16.06 ships next month) does not, so backporting Tahoe to trusty may require a backport of setuptools too.

We're trying to build pre-compiled wheels for windows and OS-X, so folks on these platforms don't need a compiler to install Tahoe. This is pretty easy for OS-X, but we're trying trying to figure out how to get our Appveyor.com -based CI system to expose the wheels it's already building.

The OpenBSD buildslave is currently failing, we think there might be an incompatibility between the "cryptography" package and the flavor of OpenSSL that's available in OpenBSD-5.6 (in particular it appears to lack the ALPN feature that "cryptography" wants to link against). We'd really like to resolve this and not have a release that fails to build on OpenBSD.

We spent some time figuring out why Daira's buildslave is failing to build anything at all. Appveyor is working, so we think windows is working overall, but we'd really like to have her buildslave operational.

OS-X ".pkg" installers are now working again (they were broken for a while after the pip switchover). They still only provide a CLI tool, not a double-clickable setup application, but it's not a bad way to get tahoe and its dependencies installed.

Windows installers are still a work-in-progress, so we don't build or upload them.

I'm hoping to announce an alpha1 release later today, or tomorrow.

Tuesday, 03/22

We worked on #2745, a Linux Mint build failure. We decided this will not be a blocker.

The Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News is published once a week by The Tahoe-LAFS

The Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News is published once a week by The Tahoe-LAFS Software Foundation, President and Treasurer: Peter Secor . Scribes: Patrick "marlowe" McDonald , Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn , Editor Emeritus: . Send your news stories to marlowe@antagonism.org - submission deadline: Monday night.