[tahoe-dev] Weekly Dev Chat report from 2013-01-31

[Zooko Wilcox-OHearn]

We held a Weekly Dev Chat on 2013-01-31

In attendance: Zooko (scribe), David-Sarah, Brian, Andrew, redhot

Not in attendance, but requested to be notified by email next week: 5 people

Notably not in attendance: Tony, who was supposed to talk to us about
his new WUI

We first talked about Tahoe-LAFS v1.10. Brian is Release Manager. He
hasn't had time to put into it in a few weeks, but expects to change
that in the future. Zooko also hasn't had time to contribute for the
last several weeks. Also David-Sarah. So, Tahoe-LAFS v1.10 hasn't
really twitched in the last several weeks, but that is about to
change.

We worked on a few tickets, see the Timeline or the Roadmap for
details (https://tahoe-lafs.org ). One ticket that isn't closed yet
and that Brian wants to hold up the 1.10 release for is #1767, because
that one is a forward-compatibility issue.

Here's the list of all tickets with the tag "blocker":

https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?status=!closed&keywords=~blocker

Next we talked about Tony's new WUI "welcome page". Andrew tried it
out for the first time and liked it. It let Andrew discover the
"Recent Uploads and Downloads" page, which was otherwise hard to
discover (which was ticket #1375).

Then Brian surprised us all by announcing that he would merge #1713
into trunk for inclusion in Tahoe-LAFS v1.10! This is exciting: it
means Tahoe-LAFS v1.10 will have a shiny new welcome page, and that
users will now start discovering the Recent Uploads and Downloads
page. Everyone please test it out!

We talked about how the "timeline" visualization, that more people are
likely to discover now, is missing some units, labels, and docs. There
are some related tickets: #1169, #1265. There was some talk about
Andrew being in a good position to write such documentation. I
remember Brian suggesting that Andrew would be well-suited to do that,
but I do not remember Andrew committing to doing it.

We talked a bit about the relationship between LeastAuthority.com and
the Tahoe-LAFS open source project. As CEO of LeastAuthority.com, I
want to develop more "unfair advantages" against our competitors, such
as in the form of new products or extensions which we have not (yet)
open-sourced. However, it is important for the future of company that
users and contributors aren't turned-off from the open source project
by our attempts to profit. Since Brian is not affiliated with
LeastAuthority.com and is a central coder and leader of the Tahoe-LAFS
project, we sought his reaction to the prospect that we would be
trying to develop such profit-making plans. He was pretty cool with
that. There are several legal and governance mechanisms in place that
would help protect the open-source project from disruption even if
LeastAuthority.com were to choose selfish strategies, or be bought by
a big company.

Regards,

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn

Founder, CEO, and Customer Support Rep

https://LeastAuthority.com

tickets mentioned in this email:

https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1169# update
documentation for the download status page
https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1265# New Visualizer is
insufficiently labelled/documented (plus layout problem)
https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1375# the performance
stats for each upload or download are really well hidden
https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1767# update
Announcement "timestamp": sequence number?