Weekly News 2003-03-10

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Mnet Hack Day

Notice

As the main page shows, there was an error in the win32 build that is exposed when one tries to edit their preferences. A fix has been added to cvs and there will be a new win32 package shortly. As a workaround, find the file named "broker.conf", edit it with a text editor, and change "downloads emp" to "downloads/temp".

Progress

The whole Mnet team has been working hard on getting the new tree into a usable state. This week saw the first publish using a new cp2pc interface thanks to the hard work of Icepick. Zooko has released a new file format that we will be switching to, so that has occupied most of his time. You may read details of this new . With this new file format uses a new erasure encoder, which Icepick is writing python wrappers for. Artimage has also done some more work on the Khashmir lookup system, moving it from egtp_new to mnet_new, as well as updating setup.py to download Khashmir and its dependencies for you.

For more information on where Mnet is headed in the future please look at . (Thanks Icepick)

Tschechow has been working around the clock, at least as far as I can tell, on writing diabolical scripts to keep track of the state of mnet. We have had an influx of users since our last release, and the subsequent story in Infoanarchy, and he has been giving us plenty of interesting statistics. He has also done work on the file verfier, which apparently is now running much more efficently, and thus is finding some files that were once thought to be lost. Finally, some of the machines that host a large part of Mnet were moved to other realspace locations.

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.