Upstream November 2021 Community Update

📣 Updates & Reporting 💪 Org Updates
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Continuous improvements

  • Org explore page
  • Improved debug window
  • ENS Metadata integration for orgs and attested profiles

Replication Summary

  • We identified the main issues with replication and collected the findings in a document.
  • With our own Upstream seed peer we addressed the critical issues and now have reliably sharing code and creating patches on pre-configured projects when connected to the peer.
  • There are still a lot of replication issues but the core functionality works reliably enough.
  • We developed a PoC test suite that checks replication with the seed under close to real world conditions. This ensures things don’t break again and helps us debug issues more easily. https://github.com/radicle-dev/radicle-upstream/pull/2618

Next steps

  • Internal networking party with stripped down seed/org node happening tomorrow
  • Run user test with functioning replication to plan next code collaboration features for upstream
  • See how we merge this upstream org node fixes back into the org node code base
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Udpate on this regarding replication: After some more tests and investigation we identified the membership and gossip protocol as the main problem areas that make replication unreliable. Specifically, there is the issue with members not joining probably that I talked about on the mailing list and the issue with gossip messages looping in the network.

While trying to contribute a proper fix for this to Radicle Link we also want to work around this so that we have stable replication with seed nodes. The idea here is to restrict the connections of a peer so that it only connects with the seed node while the seed node is able to handle a lot of simultaneously connected peers.

If this is successful we should be in a situation where we can make the Upstream seed the default seed for Upstream, host our own projects there and have external people checkout and contribute back to our project.

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