My first impressions and problems testing the github examples

Development
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After getting all excited seeing screenshots on the forum i decided to have a go and try it myself.

First thing i did was to have a look on the source code for the node.js example, which would be my platform of choice, specially because i have absolutely no experience with Rust ( and to be honest i can count on one hand how many times i heard about it ).

First thing i did was download the source and build the executable.

For my surprise it would just flash the following screenshot and close itself:

2272Ă—1504 104 KB

So i went back to the readme file, and read it again and realised that “It doesn’t work as standalone” only with “safe launcher”, so i went down to the “safe launcher” repo.

When arriving there i was surprised the README file doesn’t even explain what the project is about, on the “prerequisite” it said i need “libsodium” installed and then it went into the “build instructions”:

safe_launcher can interface conditionally against either the routing crate or a mock used for local testing.

cargo build
cargo test

So i ask myself, “what is the routing crate? what is cargo” ?

Obviously cargo isn’t installed on my computer, after googling i found out later i did need Rust installed to get cargo ( their package manager ) into my system, but Rust or Cargo isn’t on the prerequisites.

At this point i did “brew install rust” and i’m crossing fingers that will be enough to build safe_launcher, even tough at this point i don’t know really know what it is.

Conclusions:

  • I don’t know enough about MAID development ( for instance where to download the binary of the safe launcher ) to run a simple dns example and i wasn’t able to figure it out easily after reading the README files. Reading this thread did help me a lot

  • I don’t know why the standalone launcher for the dns_example is crashing, if it depends on the safe_launcher and it wasn’t found, perhaps a friendly message should appear.

  • The README files on github for safe_examples and safe_launcher are really incomplete and deserve some love

What i did trying to help:

  • Submitted a couple of pull requests to help improve the README files and create one issue

What i would love to have done:

  • Found comprehensive README files that would actually allow me to test and run the project and start building something without having to go anywhere else.

  • Found relevant links for documentation / instructions on the repositories itself.

  • Helped the Maid Safe team creating this thread from a “maid safe beginner” point of view on the repositories and examples.

What i really would like to avoid:

  • Have to use JIRA as an end-user trying to report issues specific to git repositories, also i have the impression that github issues would be more transparent and would allow other users with the same issues and talk about it. Github has been the way to go for all open source projects so would be very-counter-intuitive to post stuff on JIRA not to say there is no link to JIRA in any of the repository README files i found.
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Ah the master branch in the repo’s is not what was released (well a few days back it was). Master moves very fast at the moment.

We should release properly the version number of the apps so people can grab that github tag to replicate it all (we use semver versioning across all libs). During this phase you will see though some very fast (though hopefully small) changes to the master branch (Tip of Tree). These all will pass CI though which you can see by clicking the buttons on the README files for each lib.

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oh cool, i should have checked the other branches too.

the README file on the “dev” branches are way more friendly :slightly_smiling:

So i’ll have another go following the “dev” branches and readme files and report back.

Any advice for someone wanting to adventurously start developing apps before the 1.0 release?

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