[tahoe-dev] Tahoe-LAFS v1.7 coming soon!

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

Folks:

It looks like v1.7, which we intend to release on May 13, 2010, will  
have at least some of the following improvements:

1. Servers of Happiness (Kevan) #778
2. New Downloader (Brian, David-Sarah) #288, #448, #798, #800, #809,  
#990, #993
3. SFTP (David-Sarah) #531, #645, #941
4. Support Different Character Encodings (François) [query for  
unicode tickets]
5. usability issues (David-Sarah) [query for davidsarah tickets]
6. packaging issues (Zooko) #668, #803

This will be a solid new release of Tahoe-LAFS -- improved  
performance, usability and SFTP support, along with the continuing  
tradition of excellent reliability and backward- and forward-  
compatibility.

Help needed:

Someone please review #961 !
Someone please take over #953 !

The next release after v1.7 will be v1.8 and will probably come out  
in August, after the Google Summer of Code has wrapped up and the  
student projects have landed in trunk. That release will include the  
new features developed by GSoC students as well as more contributions  
from the folks who brought you v1.7.

The theme of the 1.8 release is not yet clear to me. Perhaps it will  
be improvements in robustness and scalability of mutable files and  
directories. I work with the Cassandra database at my employer,  
http://simplegeo.com, and I keep wondering if Tahoe-LAFS could serve  
some of the roles that Cassandra serves if Tahoe-LAFS had more  
scalable and efficient mutable files and directories.

I wouldn't  be surprised if a few of the features above slip from the  
v1.7 release and come out in the v1.8 release instead. We have only a  
few short weeks to finish up the v1.8 release and historically it has  
always taken around three weeks of testing, documentation, packaging,  
and so on to get a release out the door. That means we should start  
committing these improvements to trunk as soon as possible! You can  
help -- offer code review, manual testing, encouraging words, etc..

As usual you can see the big picture of the planned release and drill  
down to all details from The Roadmap:

http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/roadmap

Regards,

Zooko

[query for unicode tickets]
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?status=! 
closed&keywords=~unicode

[query for davidsarah tickets]
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?owner=davidsarah&status=! 
closed&milestone=1.7.0

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288# resumption of  
interrupted downloads
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448# download: speak to  
as few servers as possible
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531# SFTP frontend needs  
tests
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645# connecting to sftp  
frontend using sshfs fails from linux client
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/668# easy_install  
allmydata-tahoe is broken
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778# "shares of  
happiness" is the wrong measure; "servers of happiness" is better
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798# improve random- 
access download to retrieve/decrypt less data
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800# improve alacrity by  
downloading only the part of the Merkle Tree that you need
jjjjjkkk1Gjjjjjkk1Gjjjhttp://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/ 
803# python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in  
install directory
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/809# Measure how segment  
size affects upload/download speed.
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/941# SFTP frontend fails  
when listing a directory containing a mutable file, because it relies  
on node.get_size() to be an integer
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/953# dependency on  
pycrypto needs to be tested and supported
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961# There are no init  
scripts included in the Ubuntu apt-get install for tahoe-lafs
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990# Web gateway should  
avoid caching plaintext of downloads
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/993# refactor download  
interfaces to treat immutable files and mutable versions more uniformly