From: Zooko O'Whielacronx Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:48:43 +0000 (-0700) Subject: docs: NEWS: move the most exciting items to the top, break them out of less exciting... X-Git-Tag: allmydata-tahoe-1.3.0~47 X-Git-Url: https://git.rkrishnan.org/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=b09b81894b3b2c7075c8bbc868847cacc8fed396;p=tahoe-lafs%2Ftahoe-lafs.git docs: NEWS: move the most exciting items to the top, break them out of less exciting categories, update a couple of stale bits, and a touch of editing --- diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS index b95ffb87..6e1e405b 100644 --- a/NEWS +++ b/NEWS @@ -4,15 +4,15 @@ User visible changes in Tahoe. -*- outline -*- ** Checker/Verifier/Repairer -The focus of this release has been improving the functionality and the -usability of code which checks/verifies/repairs files and directories. -"Checking" is the act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for -the given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available, the -file/directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act of downloading -and/or cryptographically asserting that the server's share is undamaged: it -requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than checking, but can catch problems -that simple checking cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing/damaged -shares with new ones. +The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker / verifier / +repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the act of asking storage +servers whether they have a share for the given file or directory: if there +are not enough shares available, the file or directory will be +unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act of downloading and cryptographically +asserting that the server's share is undamaged: it requires more work +(bandwidth and CPU) than checking, but can catch problems that simple +checking cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares +with new ones. For mutable files (and therefore directories), missing shares can be regenerated, and corrupted shares can be repaired in place. For immutable @@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ a directory: recursively traversing the directory and its children, checking run with an "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number of files, size -histogram, etc). If repair is necessary, a "Repair" button will appear on the +histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair" button will appear on the results page. The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate check @@ -48,35 +48,7 @@ long-running deep-traversal operations, including deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon a single long-lived HTTP connection. docs/frontends/webapi.txt has details. -** Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file - -The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file, named -"tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the previous -multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards compatibility (the -embedded SSH debug server and the advertised_ip_addresses files are the -exceptions), but new directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe -create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample values -commented out. (ticket #518) - -tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and "disconnect" -timeouts (#521). - -tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters: "shares.needed" and -"shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The default parameters are still -3-of-10. - -The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an upper bound -on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed to consume) has been -replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space' control (which establishes a lower -bound on the amount of remaining space). The storage server will reject all -writes that would cause the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' -equivalent) to drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" -tahoe.cfg parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects -immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does not -prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it prevent the growth -of existing mutable shares). - -** CLI Changes +** Efficient Backup The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local pathname and a target @@ -91,11 +63,38 @@ been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup" (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable to run from a daily cronjob. -This release also adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a -combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows you to -start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in the argv list, -which is publicly visible (through the process table) on most unix systems. -Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue to our attention. +** Large Files + +The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is lifted. This +release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable shares", which permit +immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about 3*10^14). These v2 shares are +created if the file to be uploaded is too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 +shares are created if the file is small enough to fit into them, so that +files created with tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they +are not too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to +support larger files, and this release is the first release in which they are +able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are capable of supporting +large files on upload and will not attempt to upload shares of a large file +to a server which doesn't support it. + +** FTP/SFTP Server + +Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When configured with a +suitable method to translate username+password into a root directory cap, it +provides simple access to the virtual filesystem. Remember that FTP is +completely unencrypted: passwords, filenames, and file contents are all sent +over the wire in cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1) +connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit tests +yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is uncertain. Please see +docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.txt for configuration details. (#512, #531) + +** CLI Changes + +This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a combination of +'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows you to start using a +new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in the argv list, which is +publicly visible (through the process table) on most unix systems. Thanks to +Kevin Reid for bringing this issue to our attention. The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a local "bar.txt" @@ -246,28 +245,27 @@ checkout (without history) to about 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but a 'lazy' one should now be small. -The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build_tahoe", which -itself is a wrapper around "setup.py develop --prefix support/lib", with some -extra work before and after. Most of the complicated platform-dependent code -in the Makefile was rewritten in Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying -things considerably. +The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build", which itself +is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support", with some extra work +before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the complicated platform-dependent +code in the Makefile was rewritten in Python and moved into setup.py, +simplifying things considerably. Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to "setup.py -trial", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured to access the tahoe +test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe). -Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 . +Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 , although it +is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it has received more +thorough testing and deployment. Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which is no longer the case in 2.0.x . -setup.py now includes /System/Library in site-dirs when building on a Mac, -which should help it find previously-installed libraries like Twisted (#229) - ** Grid Management Tools Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory, mostly munin @@ -302,31 +300,48 @@ accounts, compares this with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This provides information on how much space could be recovered once Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection. +** Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file + +The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file, named +"tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the previous +multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards compatibility (the +embedded SSH debug server and the advertised_ip_addresses files are the +exceptions), but new directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe +create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample values +commented out. (ticket #518) + +tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and "disconnect" +timeouts (#521). + +tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters: "shares.needed" and +"shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The default parameters are still +3-of-10. + +The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an upper bound +on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed to consume) has been +replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space' control (which establishes a lower +bound on the amount of remaining space). The storage server will reject all +writes that would cause the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' +equivalent) to drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" +tahoe.cfg parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects +immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does not +prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it prevent the growth +of existing mutable shares). + ** Other Changes -Clients now declare their "oldest-supported version" to be 1.0.0 . This is -part of a backwards-compatibility system that has not yet been fully -specified. Previous releases declared their oldest-supported-version to be -the same as their current version number. +Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they support. This is +part of a new backwards-compatibility system: +http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Versioning . -The version strings (as displayed on the Welcome web page, and included in -logs) now includes a platform identifer (frequently including a linux -distribution name, processor architecture, etc). +The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the Welcome web +page, and included in logs) now includes a platform identifer (frequently +including a linux distribution name, processor architecture, etc). Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a web browser). -The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is slowly being -lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable shares", -which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about 3*10^14). These v2 -shares are not yet created by default, so that files created with tahoe-1.3.0 -can still be read by earlier versions. In the next release we will switch to -generating v2 shares, so that files created with tahoe-1.4.0 can be read by -tahoe-1.3.0 and later. Note that the storage server must also be changed to -support files larger than 12GiB, and that these changes have not yet been -implemented. (ticket #346) - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report" file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool command. For more details, @@ -345,15 +360,6 @@ through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB flash drive. -Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When configured with a -suitable method to translate username+password into a root directory cap, it -provides simple access to the virtual filesystem. Remember that FTP is -completely unencrypted: passwords, filenames, and file contents are all sent -over the wire in cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1) -connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit tests -yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is uncertain. Please see -docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.txt for configuration details. (#512, #531) - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.