Ladies and gentlemen, We proudly present issue #2 of the Tahoe Weekly News. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- | Patrick R. McDonald GPG Key: 668AA5DF | | https://www.antagonism.org/ <marlowe@antagonism.org> | | <mcdonald.patrick.r@gmail.com> | | <patrick@opensecurityfoundation.org> | ---------------------------------------------------------------- | Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium | ---------------------------------------------------------------- ========================================== Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News, issue number 2 ========================================== Welcome to the Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News (TWN) brought to you by Patrick McDonald, scribe. Tahoe-LAFS_ is a secure, distributed storage. .. _Tahoe-LAFS: http://tahoe-lafs.org Announcements and News ====================== The 1.9.0 planning has begun. The development team is evicting tickets. Brian Wagner will be posting to the tahoe-dev list regarding the 1.9.0 schedule. Tuesday at the Tahoe Summit will be deep design day with Brian Wagner. While no specifics yet, deep design day will most likely cover accounting and `signed Introducer announcements`_. Both of these features Brian has been working on for a long time. He is looking for some assistance so he can land some code. Also up for discussion will be new capability formats as MDMF caps are due in the 1.9.0 release. .. _`signed Introducer announcements`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/466 David Triendl announced he is stepping down from his longstanding role as manager for the public demo test grid. TWN would like to extend our thanks to David for his supports. We greatly appreciate it. Charles Wyble volunteered to take over the role. Charles welcome aboard, we look forward to working with you. The tahoe-dev mailing list provided an interesting discussion regarding the access control policies Tahoe-LAFS offers. Two newcomers asked the list about these policies to which various "old timers" provided explanations. See `the mailing list archives`_ for the discussion and `the overview of Tahoe-LAFS`_ for a summary of access control features. .. _`the mailing list archives`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2011-June/date.html .. _`the overview of Tahoe-LAFS`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/trunk/docs/about.rst#access-co... Tahoe is now a `special remote`_ for git-annex_. .. _`special remote`: http://git-annex.branchable.com/forum/tips:_special__95__remotes__47__hook_w... .. _`git-annex`: http://git-annex.branchable.com `210 Bitcoins`_ have been pledged to integrate Tahoe-LAFS and Bitcoin. A new ticket, 1408_ was created in response to this bounty. .. _`210 Bitcoins`: http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=2236.0 .. _1408: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1408 Interview with the Developers ============================= This past week, TWN interview Kevan. Kevan is a member of the Tahoe-LAFS development team. Kevan is working on MDMF which is the major feature of the upcoming 1.9.0 release. Thank Kevan for taking the time for this interview. Patrick: First give us a little introduction. Tell us a bit about who you are? Kevan: My Name is Kevan. I am 24. I live near Los Angeles. I work as a system administrator and am slowly completing a Master's degree in computer science. Patrick: What made you decide to develop for Tahoe-LAFS? Kevan: I learned about the project on a mailing list I follow; I think it was an email Zooko sent about Tahoe-LAFS being a (last minute) entry into the Google Summer of Code program. I looked at it, noted that it dealt with areas which interested me and noted it was primarily written in Python, which I was learning at the time. Patrick: What areas in particular interested you? Kevan: The P2P aspects, at that time. I've since grown to appreciate the use of capabilities (and capability research in general), though I'm not as familiar with that as I'd like to be. Patrick: With the upcoming new release, the big new feature is MDMF, a feature you are working on. Can you tell us what is MDMF? Kevan: In short, MDMF is more efficient mutable files. Immutable file have (always?) been segmented; in other words, they're processed not as one big piece, but in little parts. Current mutable files aren't segmented; they are processed in one big chunk. There are a few significant downsides to not chunking mutable files. Patrick: Such as? Kevan: Memory footprint, for one. If you want to add something to the end of an SDMF mutable file, you have to download and decrypt the whole thing, add your something to the end of the plaintext, then reencrypt and reupload the result. Patrick: How would the same thing work with MDMF, what would be the difference? Kevan: You'd only need to download at most the last segment (which is probably only 128KB or so in size), and all of your operations are performed on that. So that's less data sitting in RAM while you upload and less data that you need to download and upload as a result of your modification. Patrick: Sounds like this would be a significant improvement in speed. Kevan: Hopefully. I'm curious to see if any interesting use cases are enabled by efficiently modified mutable files. Patrick: Will you be attending the Tahoe Summit in San Franscisco? Kevan: Yes, I plan to. Patrick: Anything you are looking forward to at the Summit? Kevan: I don't think I've ever met any of the other developers in person, so I'm looking forward to that. I hope that we'll get close to having MDMF ready for trunk; being in one place should help speed code review along. Patrick: Any words of wisdom for new developers looking to join the Tahoe-LAFS dev team? Kevan: Join the mailing list and introduce yourself. It's likely that someone will point you to an easy starter ticket. In my experience, the hardest part of getting into a new codebase is finding a place to start, so I found that really helpful. I'm impressed with the other developers and I know I've learned a lot by working on Tahoe-LAFS. Patch Needing Review of the Week ================================ Ticket 1342_ needs review. This ticket, "rename tests of packaging and improve them to avoid spurious system-dependent test failures", is to manage small clean-up patches which we would like to see applied to 1.9.0. Review of this patch would be greatly appreciated. This page_ covers the procedures for code review. .. _1342: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1342 .. _page: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/PatchReviewProcess Bug of the week =============== Ticket 1395_ wins the award for bug of the week. This ticket covers an error which occurs when doing a check --verify on files which are bigger than 1GB. We would like to see this bug resolved in time for inclusion in 1.9.0. We would appreciate any help the community can provide with this ticket. .. _1395: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395 Company of the Week =================== Starting next week, TWN will be running a company of the week section. In this section, TWN will highlight companies which contribute to Tahoe-LAFS. It is our way of saying thank you. Related/Similar/Competive Project of the Week ============================================= Starting next week, TWN will be running a related/similar/competitive project of the week. In this section, we will discuss things we feel are good with similar or even competitive projects. Please note, no non-open source projects will be covered. .. _fifteen: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?status=!closed&keywords=~review-needed&group=milestone&col=id&col=summary&col=keywords&col=status&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=time&col=changetime&desc=1&order=changetime .. _page: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/PatchReviewProcess _______________________________________________ tahoe-lafs-weekly-news mailing list tahoe-lafs-weekly-news@tahoe-lafs.org http://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-lafs-weekly-news ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE