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Greetings from a Tahoe-LAFS contributor

Posted: 06 Apr 2021 00:18
by sajith
Hello,

I have been helping with Tahoe-LAFS project development for the past year or so. I wanted to establish contact with friends in the I2P community, give a few status updates, seek help and feedback, etc. I am mainly speaking for myself, but I will gladly take any feedback from here and report back to the project.

A problem that we have at Tahoe-LAFS project is that we do not know much about our users. We were particularly oblivious of our I2P users. We were on the verge of dropping I2P support from Tahoe-LAFS as we have been making progress with Python 3 port. And then someone stopped by Tahoe-LAFS IRC channel to ask about our I2P status. Their timing was perfect. :-)

So here are some status updates!
  • The reason we considered dropping i2p from Tahoe is lack of library support: there's Python 3 support in the master branch of txi2p, but there has not been a txi2p release with Python 3 support. We've been asking for a release for a while now, but unfortunately we haven't had much success with that.
  • Nevertheless, we are not going to drop i2p. I have forked txi2p, and released it via PyPI as txi2p-tahoe, and we're now unstuck in our Python 3 porting process. This is a friendly fork, and we will happily switch back to the original txi2p once there's activity in the original project.
  • I did some manual testing using some i2p introducers I found in this forum. Nothing seems to be terribly broken. But more testing would be helpful.
  • Although I forked txi2p library, I admit that I don't know much about I2P. I am looking forward to learning more.
  • Tahoe-LAFS has integration tests for Tor (thanks to chutney), but not for I2P. I suppose we will need to address that somehow. Would you have any advice there?
I believe we will finish Python 3 port in the coming few months (hard to give a real date, because of the nature of software). It would be great if there's interest in helping us with testing, and giving us feedback on things that could be improved.

I understand that our Trac instance and mailing list need some attention before they can be fully functional for everyone. We are mainly active on IRC, which may not be ideal for everyone. We are working on changing those things a bit.

Regards,
Sajith.