We have until the 22nd to rank these, finalize our decision on how many projects to accept (at most), and assign them to mentors. Currently we have in the top 4: - Jerome Flesch's super-FUQID app - Michael Rogers' proposed work on congestion control and load balancing - Nextgens' Installer, GCJ, packaging proposal - Michael Bendersky's search engine
Personally I think Freemail should be up there somewhere, however Ian is against this for reasons which I am not yet certain of. On Wed, May 10, 2006 at 03:47:11PM +0100, Matthew Toseland wrote: > SoC proposals so far: > > FUQID clone: Is basically a matter of coding to a design. There will be > some queries on the global queue interface, there may even be some > things that need changing, but not much, as all the functionality is > already there and used by FUQID. There are at least 3 apps for this. One > of them is more of a generic filesharing app, talking about indexes and > index plugins. > > Freemail: I think would be good. It's important from the political angle, > it's also important from the point of view of dogfood (being self > hosting). It would require considerably less supervision than FUQID, and > has been extensively discussed already. Dbkr is offering to do it, and > we can trust him as he's worked on Freenet and has already done much of > the work for Freemail. > > Congestion control and load balancing is a controversial one. I think > this would be really useful. I'm not happy about shipping 0.7 with the > current load balancing scheme. Firstly I'm not sure it works - at least > with inserts. I get reports fairly frequently from people with all their > nodes backed off and so on. Secondly, it is grotesquely insecure. And I > don't think this would be fully fixed by premix routing. However, this > would require detailed supervision. It's something that I'd like to do > for 0.7.0 anyway, and I'd welcome having that level of help; although > it's not self-contained, it gets my vote. > > OS/X bundle: This is a self-contained project which requires essentially > no supervision. It would however require a good deal of interaction with > the installer; nextgens wrote the installer, but if none of his apps > succeed he will not be available over the summer. Probably more of our > users use linux now than use OS/X but nonetheless it'd be good to have > proper OS/X support as many people who'd consider using freenet use > OS/X. > > JFKi: This is a fairly self-contained project to improve the security of > the transport layer. Right now, it's ephemeral Diffie-Hellman). It will > soon be something like STS (signed DH). The proposal is to implement > JFKi, which is an industrial strength, rather complex, connection setup > protocol, which is strongly resistant to DoS and in which almost > everything can be precomputed. This would be wrapped in our existing > symmetric crypto layer to prevent traffic profiling, just as we wrap DH > now. I think this is fairly low priority, the main reason being that > only those who have a noderef can DoS the node (on CPU or memory), and > very few will on darknet. On opennet it's a different matter, but still, > it doesn't seem that important to me. > > Freesite spiders: A good spider would support both metadata and content > based indexing. It has been proposed for spiders to automatically > publish index sites a la 0.5; this may be useful, but publishing > searchable indexes is probably just as important if not more so. There > are people working on spiders already for this purpose, but that doesn't > necessarily disqualify this. One of the proposee's has experience > working on distributed search. One at least proposes an external search > app; a plugin might be better, or both could be implemented. I think a > good spider would be a reasonable contribution anyway. > > Untrusted plugins: This would allow for dynamic web content and so on > over Freenet; pages like Slashdot, or a wiki. The web is important IMHO, > even if it's not the best UI in the world, it's the most used UI in the > world! Would be quite a difficult project to get completely right, and > might require significant supervision. I think it might be worth it; Ian > doesn't. I think maybe we should postpone this one for next year. > > Local messaging and file sharing: IMs, chat boards, searchable file > archives, on your direct peers, or nodes only a few hops away. This > would encourage people to connect to their friends, help to find stuff, > and build the darknet community. However, it might be seen as too close > to "filesharing". I think this would be useful, but maybe not as useful > as some of the other proposals. > > Installer etc: Nextgens has proposed a grab bag of fixing the installer, > creating a systray icon widget, creating an uninstaller, fixing the > serious flaws in the php on the website, splitting up freenet-ext.jar, > fixing the rest of the GCJ problems and packaging freenet for linux > dists. I think this is an interesting proposal. We absolutely must have > an uninstaller, there are serious issues with the website, an icon would > be good, and sorting out free JVMs and packaging would be really nice > for the large part of the community that runs freenet and the much > larger group of people who would run freenet if it was well-behaved and > didn't require sun java. Wouldn't require much supervision. This is by > nextgens, just as dbkr's is by dbkr; obviously these are people we know, > so we have to be careful not to show favouritism. > > STUN/UP&P/etc: STUN would be useful, although it relies on public > servers (these are used by lots of other apps too). UP&P would also be > useful, although there are security issues with it, and also deployment > issues (it's often either disabled or not working). The basic objective > here is to 1) find our current IP, and 2) open the port if possible. > ARKs will go a long way towards fixing these problems however. This is > another middle-ranked application IMHO. > > Transport plugins: This would be really cool, but is probably too > advanced for *this* summer. I don't personally see why the interface and > a few really basic plugins can't be written in 2 months, but the proposer > (nextgens) isn't convinced. It would probably require detailed > supervision. Obviously carrier pigeon etc will have to wait; high > latency transports will require major core changes which we're not ready > for yet, probably in 0.8 (passive requests maybe). So another middle > ranking app; and Ian will probably say no. > > FCPv2 libs: There is a proposal to write FCPv2 libraries in a number of > languages. This will be useful; the main downside is that FCPv2 is quite > simple, so many people trying to write apps will not be prevented by the > lack of a library. > -- > Matthew J Toseland - toad at amphibian.dyndns.org > Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/ > ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. Our Boss says so. > _______________________________________________ > Tech mailing list > Tech at freenetproject.org > http://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech -- Matthew J Toseland - toad at amphibian.dyndns.org Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/ ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. 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