Hi everyone,
Sometimes, here in the MaidSafe mothership things are that manic / exciting (delete as appropriate) that we don’t communicate as well as we could with the rest of the SAFE community. One idea to help rectify this is for a weekly dev update to be posted to maidsafe.org, so once a week I am going to collect updates from the rest of the guys and post them on here. If you guys have questions or would like to know more then please ask and I will try to answer, or I will pull a relevant dev in to provide more detail. So here goes…
Network Setup - Example 1
So we finally got to release the first of the example projects this week. We were originally thinking of getting the python script we’ve been using for a while ported to Windows to serve as this network setup script, However the group consensus was to have a cross platform C++ tool do the same job as it meant it could interface with the Vault Manager properly and also allow us to extend this tool in the coming weeks to provide more options that could assist with further setup and diagnosing options (more info about this in the coming weeks). It’s been quite hectic getting this example out as it involved getting the Vault Manager updated to handle a few of the vault lifetime monitoring operations in a cross platform manner. The team managed to get all the issues ironed out and with successful CI runs on the “next” branch, this new target has been merged to master.
A special mention goes out to @frabrunelle from safenetforum.org who suggested GitBook for documentation. After playing about with the tool for a while, we decided to use it for the Examples project. You can check out the documentation here
Vault Refactor
The dev team have also been busy with a vault refactor for safecoin use, i.e. not needing delete and maid managers as well as linking resource to users directly. Now users can access the system in a mix of free and paid by safecoin which will recycle for farmers and builders to mine effectively. This reduces code, increases speed and will help adoption significantly. It means the system, almost complete, is going a little sideways as we reduce this codebase in line with the design alteration. This is a good thing and we do not imagine it will hinder us as less code is less debugging and maintenance, etc. Testnet1 will have some older code until the refactor takes over here to. This is still going ahead though to allow us to monitor and measure some important algorithms, especially in rUDP and routing. Expect testnet1 to be very slow and heavily monitored.
Testnet 1 - preparation work
We have also been working on the infrastructure groundwork for testnet 1. We are now in a position where we can quickly create hundreds of VPS based vaults in various global geographic locations; destroy these; roll out code updates and recreate the testnet infrastructure. The additional features that are going to be added to the Network Set-up tool are also going to assist greatly in enabling and testing testnet 1.
When will it be available? Unfortunately just now we cannot commit to an exact date for testnet 1. We understand this is frustrating, but everyone is working very hard towards making this happen. It feels very close and as soon as we know we will share the details with the community.
Another place to keep up-to-date with what has been happening is the blog
Please leave frank feedback (I know you will) so this can evolve into something useful to the community that keeps everyone more informed.