By
Paige Peterson
These updates are now categorized by
working groups.
A note before diving into things, our detectors have noticed a good amount of nodes still crashing from transactions submitted to the network which trigger the bug fixed in the
1.0.8-1 release. This means that many of you still need to
upgrade! We suspect that some of these nodes might have an auto-restart script as we haven’t received any requests for support on crashing nodes. Because a good number of nodes are still crashing, we’re going to be leaving up the alert banner on our website for at least another week or two.
Meta:
We intend to pick up on continuing to organize the various working groups and pushing for some regular meetings between their members after the upcoming release. Keep an eye on the working groups and let us know if you’d like to join any of them as a member. There are also several
proposed groups which need coordinators, if one of those sounds especially interesting and you’d be keen to take the lead, let us know!
It’s also worth noting that we’re still transitioning into using
Github projects and may split some existing projects into more focused categories. The eventual goal will be to have all tickets and pull-requests organized within at least one project and rely less on the label system.
Protocol:
We’re pretty much in the same state as
last week’s update on the Sapling and HF0 discussions since getting backed up on the network performance issues and focusing on the upcoming release. Stay tuned for more info on these discussions in the coming weeks.
You can monitor progress for protocol related tickets in the
Sapling protocol upgrade and
Hard Fork 0 projects.
Release:
This week focused a lot on the upcoming
1.0.9 release scheduled for next Tuesday, May 16th. We might, however, delay the release by a week and will communicate any changes as soon as we’ve decided! Apologies for any inconvenience! This release will be mainly focused on
Security and stability and
Development infrastructure projects.
Development infrastructure:
We’ve had some discussion this week on continued improvements for CI automation so we can officially support more platforms, include more benchmarks and improve the overall deployment process.
We made some big progress upgrading our automation infrastructure this week (to Buildbot 0.9), however, most of this project is documented in a private github repo. We may move these to a public view in the future.
The tickets that are public can be found in the
Development infrastructure project.
Network infrastructure:
We’re creating more and more detectors to monitor network stability, particularly in response to the network performance issues we saw last week.
You can keep track of monitoring related tickets in the
Monitoring, metrics & analysis project.
We also discussed new benchmarks that would help to identify issues that came up in the network performance incident such as testing transactions with many txouts (
# 1077) and the time it takes to connect to the slowest block we know about (
# 2355).
Berkeley DB replacement:
Keep an eye out for progress in the
replacing walletDB with SQLite project. Nothing substantial has been discussed around this since last update.
Miscellaneous:
We released the next part in the SNARK explainer
“Explaining SNARKs Part VI: The Pinocchio Protocol“ and a post on
“Getting Started Developing with Zcash”.
We’re working on hiring translators so we can include Japanese and French translations for the website and
documentation.
Some progress has happened on XCAT development which can be tracked in the
XCAT project.
As a final note, kudos to
@shawn for adding some updates to the
Zcash wikipedia page and thanks to all who asked questions in our
AMA today. We had substantially fewer questions than the last two times so perhaps this means we’re doing a good job at being transparent and answering questions when they come up in the community chat or forum!
