[tahoe-dev] Tahoe-LAFS v1.9 plan. (It is going to ROCK! :-))

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Folks:

Well, Tahoe-LAFS v1.8 is finally final. It seems pretty solid—there
are no reports of regressions or unexplained behavior (except for
#1212).

Our main focus for v1.9 is to integrate the four successful Google
Summer of Code projects from this summer. As soon as we have all four
of them integrated then we'll go into release cycle mode where we put
out a beta release and defer other disruptive patches until Tahoe-LAFS
v1.10.

Of course, there are a substantial number of other improvements that a
lot of people want to see, and if you submit a patch that implements
any of those we won't say no! (Although if it is late enough in the
release cycle, we'll say "Yes, for v1.10.".)

As always we'll use the trac Roadmap feature to manage the process. Go
to http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/roadmap to see how we are
progressing and to find ways to help.

Here is the current description of the 1.9.0 Milestone on the Roadmap:

    * integrate the fruits of the Google Summer of Code 2010
          o Medium-Sized Distributed Mutable Files (Kevan, Brian) #393
          o Multiple Introducers (Faruq, Zooko) #68
          o XSalsa20+AES-128 Encryption in Tahoe-LAFS, enhancements to
pycryptopp (HKDF, HMAC, XSalsa20) (Yu Xue, Jack) #1164
          o make sure Tahoe-LAFS v1.9.0 is a good platform for running
Josip's Music Player :-) (Josip, David-Sarah) #1023
    * fix major outstanding issues which harbor bad failure modes or
impact reliability
          o memory leak in SFTP #1045
          o inability to achieve happiness in upload/repair #614, #1124, #1130
          o bugs in mutable file handling #232, #270, #474, #480,
#540, #546, #547, #548, #549, #667, #846, #893, #1004, #1042

Note that Yu Xue's GSoC work is partly to be merged into pycryptopp
and partly (the part that hasn't been done yet) into Tahoe-LAFS.
Josip's work isn't to be merged into Tahoe-LAFS at all, but I think
there are some packaging, deployment, testing, etc. issues that need
to be worked out for Josip's decentralized web app, similar to the
issues we face with Brian's New Download Visualizer web app:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1200# package up Brian's
New Visualization of immutable download

Okay, let's do it! Tahoe-LAFS v1.9 is going to be a great version! And
I'm really looking forward to all four of the GSoC students seeing
their work get widely distributed and used. :-)

Regards,

Zooko