Community Update 55

General

Welcome Chris Boscolo as product owner.
Sprint and Release
- 2-week sprint ends Jan. 21 Priority is platform stability, bug fixes, and feature specification.
- Extreme coding session planned for next week in Warsaw with Greg and the team. Priorities are implementation of cost accounting and wallets.
- RNode v0.8.2 released on Jan. 7. Please see RNode-0.8.2 release plan for more details.
- RNode v0.8.3 releases week of Jan. 21
Mercury requirements and acceptance criteria
- Please see documentation at https://github.com/rchain/rchain/blob/dev/docs/features.md. This is our focal point. SRE team and bounty developers working on test development to validate completion of these features.
Work with Whiteblock
- Whiteblock team continues work to implement the RChain test plan into the testing environment (https://github.com/rchain/rchain/blob/dev/docs/whiteblock-test-plan.md). Last week ran into some issues related to surfacing metrics in Grafana. Plan to meet this Fri. to see demo and hand off to dev team.
Test net status
- A public test net is not yet available.
- A view of the issues blocking launch of a public test net is available here.
- Platform stability is priority #1 for most people on the team.

Almost done with effort make changes the codebase to use F consistently, rather than mixing F and Task; RCHAIN-2227 - Getting issue details... STATUS .
Work in progress to update the performance test harness and deliver a contract to measure performance in terms of COMM events. This will be used to support baseline and regression testing for all commits.

Updated User guide for running RNode with change for how to call metrics to find out peer count.
Related to supporting blocks of various sizes, PR for RCHAIN-1615 - Getting issue details... STATUS merged. It introduces a circuit breaker mechanism to support the handler deciding
to break a circuit based on how much data was read so far and to not continue handling the stream if it is too large for the node. Next step is to specify and implement what conditions should trigger the circuit breaker; RCHAIN-2792 - Getting issue details... STATUS .
Work started on new configuration file format; RCHAIN-1944 - Getting issue details... STATUS

PR for blockskore received final approval today. Next PR is in to provide block storage checkpointing. RCHAIN-652 - Getting issue details... STATUS
Test for block finalization in development; RCHAIN-2846 - Getting issue details... STATUS to help investigate a finalization bug blocking platform stability.

This week we replace the Turan oracle with the clique safety oracle; RCHAIN-2835 - Getting issue details... STATUS . This should help us debug any issues with the safety oracle
as now we aren't using a lower bound on the maximum clique size.
Investigating a bug related to an assertion error and the safety oracle; RCHAIN-2805 - Getting issue details... STATUS . This is related to bonding and the agreement with the safety oracle about the status of a newly bonded validator. There was a PR last week that addressed one cause of this error. However, we observed the error again in yesterday's community test and for a different reason. Looking to the investigation to show if. this is a blip or something more serious. Simultaneously work is underway to expand and improve the test coverage for various bonding scenarios; RCHAIN-2831 - Getting issue details... STATUS

Developing tests to validate status of Mercury feature requirements.
Addressing bug observed in RDoctor during this week's community test.
Implementation work started on a monitoring system for coop-maintained nodes, including bootstrap nodes.

Date
16 Jan 2019