Hiya,
Planning phase for the Rust-5 sprint began last week and slack channels have been noisier than ever! The reason for the noise is that the team are now following the RFC process with all significant changes moving forward and the new process is having the desired effect of increasing discussion and collaboration! It is great to see some external RFCs being submitted, awesome to see the community getting in on the act!
Last week was the first of the two week planning phase of the Rust-5 sprint, the maintainers started to plan for the features that would be implemented during the sprint. The RFC for the change/feature is raised by the maintainer with a detailed description including code snippets to explain how the feature is expected to be implemented. There were few main RFCs that have been raised last week, Messaging, Launcher Approach 1, Launcher Approach 2, UDP hole punching, Address Relocation in Routing, Improvement to Unified Structured Data and one more in the pipeline for Connections Management in Routing.
Few RFCs are confined to changes only within the library such as UDP hole punching in CRUST. At the same time there are RFCs like Launcher and MPID messaging which require changes to be made across multiple crates.
Two RFCs are raised for launcher implementation, both of them explaining different possible approaches. Both the RFCs are actively discussed to identify the best suited one.
During this week, the maintainers will be reviewing the RFCs raised from other dependant libraries. For example, Launcher RFC will be reviewed in detail by members from Vault, while MPID messaging will be reviewed by the Client guys. This process of reviewing peer RFCs is to ensure that the RFC provides sufficient information needed for implementing the feature. With this process in place, we are hoping that the community members will benefit from getting more input from the RFC before they pick up a task and execute it easily as a part of the bounty program.
The scope of Rust-5 seems to be big in terms with the features and also the time that would be required. We are therefore planning to get the RFCs merged by the middle of this week after the review is completed and then fully spec out the tasks in JIRA. Finally based on the total story points the actual scope of the sprint will be determined(maybe move a few RFCs if needed to the next sprint for implementation). We would likely see rust-5 sprint span 3-4 weeks, but we must wait with our fingers crossed until we decide the features that would actually make its way into the sprint. We will of course let you all know as soon as this has been decided.
On a sidetrack, I have been working on a tool to help the QA guys. As most of you would be aware, we are testing our binaries/examples in the droplets (more like a small network wide test). Setting up each test cycle has been a time taking process and the same manual work had to be carried out on 10-20 droplets. Phew! that seems to be tiring. So we decided to pull out a simple command line tool that would help in setting up an environment across droplet endpoints that would facilitate with running our libraries examples / binaries. Hopefully this reduces the time taken for us to set up a throw away debugging environment.
One more exciting sprint is shaping up.
