Community Update 95

Owned by Rao Bhamidipati
Last updated: Oct 23, 2019

General

  • Release
    • Node version 0.9.15 is the current release RNode-0.9.15 release plan
    • Testnet is currenty running rnode version 0.9.15

    • The 0.9.15 includes the new type safe API (instead of Either), some fixes for Long Proposal Times Issue, Offchain-data API (events API) improvements and other incremental progress in features discussed below.

  • Sprint 40 in progress
    • Main focus is on reaching Testnet 3 (a) Cost accounting  (b) Long proposal times - Fairness Constraint and other improvements (d) Additional tests for multisig features (e) ongoing work in Casper tests independent of network layer (f) Ongoing work in Planning and implementation for Network safety, reliability and hardening
    • Cost accounting
      • Design and Scope of work at https://gist.github.com/ArturGajowy/73e481767548b084a8e5d7c19bb1f70c
      • Implementation in progress for these preliminary tasks needed for implementing the main portions of cost accounting:
      • The 'System Deploy' construct, RCHAIN-3767 - Getting issue details... STATUS  necessary for cost accounting, is implemented and in review. Expected to be merged soon.
      • In parallel, work has started on combinatorial Rholang terms in contracts, to test stability of cost accounting across such combinations.
      • Remaining chunks of work in cost accounting are (a) writing the charging logic RCHAIN-3625 - Getting issue details... STATUS  and RCHAIN-3624 - Getting issue details... STATUS    -work is starting on these two tickets, (b) modifying existing tests to match the new code (c) writing additional tests (d) writing integration tests. Trying to maximally parallelize test writing effort. Working in shifts on large PRs. 
    • Reduce long proposal times: 
      • Initial implementation of a (simple round robin) fairness constraint as an additional mechanism to address long proposal times.  PR https://github.com/rchain/rchain/pull/2776  corresponding to RCHAIN-3879 - Getting issue details... STATUS  is in review, and waiting to be merged. Final tests are currently being done to measure actual improvement from this fairness constraint.
      • Observed that 'create block' is where the rabbiting behavior starts. Investigating reasons thereof to understand the problem at a more granular level.  RCHAIN-3724 - Getting issue details... STATUS
      • Investigating improvements to other bottlenecks e.g. in slow finalization  RCHAIN-3872 - Getting issue details... STATUS  , ignore invalid blocks in toposort: Merged https://github.com/rchain/rchain/pull/2757 etc.  Additional improvements to finalization implemented, including making finalization persistent:
      • We continue to explore various test parameters and more complex contracts, to both test the stability of this issue and make it manifest sooner if it exists.
    • Rspace
      • In Progress - In RSpace, an API is implemented for DAG discovery and block discovery, to enable an alternative to ListenForData@Name (Off-chain observability of deploy results). Relevant tickets are  RCHAIN-3760 - Getting issue details... STATUS   RCHAIN-3661 - Getting issue details... STATUS  and   RCHAIN-3762 - Getting issue details... STATUS  and  RCHAIN-3812 - Getting issue details... STATUS  
      • A simplistic Block Explorer is implemented https://github.com/rchain/rchain/pull/2725  Documentation on how to use it at Data reporting
    • In Review - Implementation of mult-sig vault features is ongoing as detailed in  RCHAIN-3392 - Getting issue details... STATUS   RCHAIN-3196 - Getting issue details... STATUS   RCHAIN-3223 - Getting issue details... STATUS  and  RCHAIN-3773 - Getting issue details... STATUS .  Additional changes being made to the code based on design discussion.In final review - https://github.com/rchain/rchain/pull/2774 Next step is to add more tests for this.
    • Refactoring, Optimizations and bug fixes - ongoing 

Mercury requirements and acceptance criteria

Blockers to testnet-3

  • TBD

Risks to code completion for Mercury

  • Evaluating backlog vs current velocity 

Developer website

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