Folks: Here are just a few scattered notes about how I'm not sure who is going to move Tahoe forward in which ways next. Your opinions about what should be done, and your offers to do them, would be gratefully accepted. First of all, about me. I'm interviewing for new jobs (if you were considering offering to hire me, now is the time!). As part of this process I'm asking potential employers if they will give me a degree of moral support to work on Tahoe in my "spare time". I'm also encouraging Peter Secor in his efforts to find renewed funding for Tahoe development, either on a commercial basis from someone who intends to make money with this technology, or on a philanthropic basis from someone who thinks that this technology could improve people's lives. It could turn out that within a week or two from writing this letter I will take on some exciting new job which is not directly related to Tahoe and my contributions to Tahoe will lessen dramatically. Now about Brian: it looks like he is still planning to do lots of hacking on Tahoe this summer, and he's an awesome hacker, so you can expect top-quality work from him. Kevin Reid is not going to work on a Tahoe GUI this summer after all -- the Google Summer of Code people asked him to work on a remote object protocol for caja instead. (Which is cool, but I'm still disappointed.) The student-and-mentor team of Vincent Chow and Nathan Wilcox appear to be determined to marry a decentralized revision control tool such as Bazaar or Mercurial with Tahoe this summer. It seems to me that it would be easy to make a proof-of-concept for that but hard to make a solid, high performance, usable tool. I can't wait to see what they do! Shawn Willden is presumably still in his secret underground lair in Utah hacking on GridBackup. He hasn't been very active on this list, but he has published his git repo... Hm, looks like he hasn't updated that git repo since he first committed to it in February. By the way, here is a podcast of his presentation about GridBackup to the Utah Python group: http://podcast.utos.org/index.php?cat=gridbackup Mahmoud More wants to work on decentralizing the introducer. If one confines oneself to implementing ticket #68, comment #11, *and nothing else* then this is a small, confined project that a student like Mahmoud could accomplish in one summer. However, Mahmoud would need a mentor to guide him, and because of my job situation I might not have the time to commit to that. Frangois Deppierraz is eager to fix #534 (encoding issues). He has submitted a patch, which I didn't apply because it is a large patch and it takes me a while to get my head around it and to check if all of its changes are covered by unit tests. I started splitting it up into smaller patches, but, again, I don't really have time to do more on that right now, so if Frangois or anyone else could look at those patches and make sure that everything that we care about is tested with a unit test then that would be forward progress! I might be forgetting other people who are currently working on Tahoe improvements. If so, I apologize and please speak up. Now, per my earlier cryptic notes about Tahoe development strategy [1], my next priorities for Tahoe are: * short-length feedback loop with actual users * inclusion in Debian & Fedora - pycryptopp linkage * low hanging fruit of performance * encoding * volunteergrid If anybody wants to help out with things along these lines, speak up! Let's make a goal to have a new stable release of Tahoe, containing *some* kind of improvements that people would care about, having no known regressions, and having thorough unit tests for all changed code, in June 2009 -- about two months since the v1.4 release. Regards, Zooko [1] http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2009-March/001506.html tickets mentioned in this message: http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/68#comment:11 # distributed introduction COMMENT ELEVEN http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/534 # "tahoe cp" command encoding issue _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-dev@allmydata.org http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev ----- 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