Update 15 September, 2022

[Toivo]

I have started to doubt the way the development is done at the moment. I mean the “launch as soon as possible” approach. I think it leads to all aspects of the networks being developed in sync, which is in many ways a good idea. But there is the problem, that it seems to be leading loss of incrementality in development, and that way all of the possible value realized all at once, but rather later than sooner.

I have to support my living costs by selling my crypto holdings regularly. I am now 100% MAID because I have sold everything else. And I have started to sell those too. It looks like I’m not going to have any left at launch, if it is going to take more than six months until that. Of course, if there would be some advancement, that would prove itself a bit more in a comnet -type of situtation, things could get different.

One such thing could be a network, that is able to hold itself up without doing much, or anything else. I mean something like the “no data” network, that was able to get past many splits several months ago:

@maidsafe

We’ve continued some ongoing refactoring work, organising the safe_network repo, and we’ve started looking at what “light” nodes look like, and what a node running bare “network system” code looks like. The reason for this was to help debugging by having a mode modular system where we could, for example, turn off data and only run dbc code, or turn it off altogether. Our testing there was encouraging - with data turned off, nodes were topping out at around ~45mb memory, and we’ve happily had ~90 running on one machine with several section splits .

I thought something like that was cooking, when I saw this PR, but it has not had any commits since over a month ago:

https://github.com/maidsafe/safe_network/pull/1387

So, what I wish now, is some stripped down version, that could hold itself up in a distributed way, meaning from machines from our homes. I know that without data, farming, tokens etc. the whole network would be meaningless, but it is also true that without the working structure, all the developement in data, DBC’s, farming, etc. are useless.

Another thing I’d like to change is developing for Linux/Win/Mac all at once. I am not sure about the magnitude of the effect, but it seems that quite often the CI tests are failing in one of the systems, and fixing the problem there can take hours / days. I have said that before, and I was refuted. It may happen again, and I may be wrong here, but the observation, that fixing some problems in Mac for example, when everything else are working, takes time is absolutely true. And when I look back and see all the solutions, that has not been working, I wonder how many hours was wasted in trying them on all the platforms?

So could we change the development towards less parallel approach, please? You already found it beneficial to take step back from multithreading, maybe it would be good idea put some threads aside in a metaphorical sense as well?