Weekly News 2003-02-23

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Mnet Hack Day

"Well this is another fine Hack Day(tm) you've gotten us into." A number of hackers banded together today on #mnet to forge ahead into uncharted territories and work on the new codebase. (Which is cleverly named _new.)

progress

Infoanarchy recently published a review of the upcoming v0.6.1 release of Mnet. We are proud to say that the story was favorable, and we think it will give us some good exposure. This is always a nice thing, but especially important now since we need to grow our network to test its scaling capabilities. If you would like to help there are many things you can do, recruiting users, putting up high quality content, and running a block store are just a few ways to garner some love from the Mnet community.

Having wrapped up all the bugs in the sf.net tracker for v0.6.1 a release is imminent. Expect an official announcement to come out within the next 24 hours. This means that most of Hack Day was spent working on mnet_new, the much improved and cleaned up code base. Icepick made great strides in getting the new tree to a stage where it was usable by others. The key feature of the new codebase is that the network code has been refactored into its own separate library.

Arno, Tschechow, and Zooko have put in a lot of time on searches, and it has payed off. Searches are now faster than ever. Also a second Meta tracker and a third Bootpage have been added, thus getting rid of a single point of failure and adding some robustness to the network. Finally Nejucomo's Ogg Vorbis code has been integrated, this means that all you Ogg lovers no longer have to retype in the data about your music.

Icepick has also just released the first epydoc generated documentation for mnetlib. This first page is a great starting point for figuring out the layout of mnetlib. These help docs are generated from the comments in the code, so they will be kept in a lockstep with the changing of the code. We hope that this will make our codebase more accessible to those who wish to add neat new features.

help wanted

The Mnet Hackers are always happy to have more help. The major project currently underway is the v0.6.2 migration project which could use hackers to change all the code to fit the new coding standards and to get all of the Python extension modules to build and link on all platforms using the new distutils build system. Also, we can always use more testing and bug reporting.