A New WAPI and WUI proposal

Discussion began regarding a new WAPI and WUI.

Tuesday 06/28/16

Attendees: warner, ramki, cypher, zooko

• used google hangout this time, all went well except for zooko's browser crashing a lot
• zooko and LAE folks are using Slack a lot, but there's an IRC-to-slack bridge so they can still see #tahoe-lafs
• ramki is interested in porting Magic-Wormhole to Android
• discussed leasedb, parts of which are in the cloud-backend branch
• also #1834 which is about using the leasedb exclusively and removing the share-crawler tools
• magic-folder branch is ready to land, warner ran the tests and found they only add about 10% to the test runtime. currently waiting on daira to agree to landing magic-folder before cloud-backend instead of vice versa
• warner wants to release a 1.13 with magic-folders and whatever else has already landed. To do that, we'll rename the current Trac 1.13 milestone up to 1.14, move most existing 1.12 tickets into a new 1.13, then whittle 1.12 down to magic-folders plus anything else that's already done, then release 1.13.
• warner suggested removing the numbered not-immediately-upcoming Trac milestones (i.e. 1.13 and 2.0), maybe moving those tickets into a "sooner" milestone to indicate that we care about them more than "soon" and "eventually" and "undecided". Given our erratic release and development schedule, I'm not sure that assigning tickets to milestones more than a few months out is really useful.
• to make process on accounting, warner will publish a description of a new WAPI protocol to the mailing list: websocket, CBOR, access tokens, safe origin (unsullied by attacker-controlled grid-stored documents)
• we plan to add a Trac wiki page for next week's devchat, with an agenda and notes

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Attendees: zooko, warner, dawuud, meejah, ramki, cypher

• warner, dawuud, meejah will spend time wednesday pairing on tor/multi-introducer stuff
• discussed warner's new WAPI plan
  • one idea: do CBOR over unix-domain sockets, pass file handles to gateway process for uploading
  • similar: given proof that the WAPI client has local filesystem access, gateway could use open() on local filesystem
  • either would make uploads faster, removing a extra copy operation folks were generally negative on the gateway doing filesystem access
  • dawuud is thinking of Subgraph environments where client and gateway have separate (sandboxed) filesystems, even though they nominally run on the same computer
• one-pass vs multi-pass uploads
  • warner is working on blog post to compare potential new encoding schemes
  • in some, we can get one-pass uploads by giving up on convergent encryption, probably convergent share placement
  • convergent share placement matters more on large grids (nodes > N)
  • zooko wants to figure out if this is possible, or impossible, and then stop thinking about it forever
  • fun idea that probably won't work: place shares wherever, then build a short bloom filter to remember where the shares went, then append the bloom filter to the readcap
    • repair / server churn will cause the filter to become inaccurate
    • doesn't converge between multiple uploads
  • noted that the backupdb (especially if enhanced by file hashes) reduces the need for tahoe-level convergence
• how to achieve a universal grid ("one true grid" use case)
  • resource (bandwidth) allocation, storage incentives
  • downloaders need both filecap and either a way to pay a server for download access or someone else who is willing to pay the server, and a scaleable way to find the servers
  • uploaders need a way to pay servers to accept and hold shares, and to record the servers that were used (rather, the servers that will be useful for the downloader)
  • current Accounting design is very person-centric
  • might be useful to add more file-centric options: per-file pre-paid storage costs, pre-paid download-bandwidth budget
  • someone who loves the data (as opposed to the person who uploaded it) could deposit credit to pay for future downloads (by anybody), the API would look like add-lease or renew-lease but would not be tied to an Account
  • maybe make a new database for this, "accessdb" or something

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Attendees: warner, zooko, daira, liz

• topics:

• daira is still working on cloud-backend
• daira agreed to have magic-folders land as-is
• talked about how to achieve the "OneTrueGrid": scaling problems, etc
• we're planning to add a wiki page with meeting agendas, etc
• hopefully the first half of the weekly meeting will be nuts+bolts: ticket triage, specific decisions about current branches, then the second half can be weird science stuff

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