We should try to release a beta of Freenet 0.8 in the reasonably near future. Ian has suggested mid-March. I'm of the view that late March is more feasible. This is on the basis that a lot of debugging will happen after the beta! Here's an overview of the features and bugs that we need to deal with most urgently:
1. BROWSER RELATED STUFF Because we got rid of the Firefox profile, for excellent reasons, we now have to make Freenet work better with an un-tweaked browser: - History cloaking. I am working on this at present; it should be finished reasonably soon. Basically we add a ?secureid= parameter to every page on fproxy (whether on freenet or generated). This can of course be turned off. The Browse Freenet script will read a file and open the correct page; users will be encouraged to paste keys into the open-a-key box rather than appending them to http://127.0.0.1:8888/. - Basic progress screen. When the user clicks on a link, Freenet should display a simple progress page, updated every 5 seconds. This will minimize the number of connections tied up by the browser, and may allow us to turn off the maximum size limit for data sent to the browser; it would be particularly impressive if somebody implemented a filter for e.g. mp3/ogg, but I'm not going to have time before 0.8. - Turn off persistent connections support in the installer. Firefox and probably other browsers allow more connections if they are not persistent. CAVEATS: - I'm really not convinced that the basic progress screen on its own will yield adequate performance. It could be improved significantly by some javascript, but the real worry is once a page has loaded, it may have inline images which are over 64k and therefore not in the container, or which are not in the container because the site is over 2MB total, or which are fetched from other freesites. With the default limit of 8 connections per server, especially if the user opens multiple freesites in tabs, this could be a serious slowdown. - The real solution is either an XULRunner-based (or similar) frontend (a lot of work), or some fairly heavy javascript to post loading graphics over every image that can't be immediately loaded, and poll fproxy frequently for updates. Or even reinstating the firefox profile, but that's hideously ugly. Even the basic click-on-a-link progress screen would benefit from some javascript, and I certainly don't have time to learn given a deadline. 2. DB4O This is a major feature which has involved a great deal of work. It is mostly complete. The remaining issues: - Finish and test deletion of unused data structures. - Sort out the temporary bucket handling: The single-file temp buckets code has some serious problems, and in a wider sense we need garbage collection of unused buckets if they get forgotten about by a bug. - Implement a preference for sending requests which have recently had successes. We have this at least partially on trunk, but the architecture is different. - Sort out inserts. Inserts do seem to work, but large inserts cause OOMs, and inserts in general cause a lot of database access (= disk I/O). It may be necessary to refactor inserts to be handled on a segment basis, as requests are. 3. PLUGINS AND FREETALK It would significantly improve Freenet's appeal to new users if we could include Freetalk. - p0s has done lots of work on this. I am not 100% up to date at the moment; last I heard the NNTP interface was almost working and the web interface had the ability to display messages. - Hopefully p0s will be able to bring this to something resembling production by the time 0.8 ships? - Clearly it will be necessary to distribute updates to Freetalk. We have also had fairly serious problems with old versions of other plugins. Right now updating plugins is difficult and non-anonymous. IMHO it is necessary to implement auto-update of plugins over Freenet. Since Freetalk depends on the WoT plugin, we probably will need basic dependancy support too. 4. MISC UI ISSUES There is much that can be done to improve the user interface, most of it relatively small changes: - It is essential that the searching plugin work out of the box. We still get lots of complaints about Freenet lacking a search function. This is probably a loading order problem and should be relatively easy to fix. However the latest version of the wAnnA index doesn't work because of a metadata problem; this needs to be fixed urgently. - Lots of small stuff e.g. moving messages to the friends page, just showing one useralert indicating new messages... - Slightly larger stuff e.g. dividing the interface up and getting geeky stuff out of the way using submenus, making specific pages more user friendly (e.g. Friends). - More work on the help toadlet may be a good idea. 5. OTHER STUFF Various: - We may or may not want to try to scale the number of peers with the bandwidth limit. - Metadata changes: Currently splitfiles ignore the last data block for decoding. A new metadata format would solve this, as well as improving robustness against future bugs (we had silent data corruption for a while). -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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