Hello friends,
It’s been a wild few months. We launched our beta and we announced our token. We’re seeing lots of excitement and buzz. So what’s next when it comes to radicle-link and radicle-upstream? Well this a well poised question because next is exactly what’s coming.
We launched our first beta based on a maint branch in radicle-link. There was, however, some skunkworks going on behind the scenes for improving the code in several ways. This ongoing effort lived on a branch called next, while maint lived on for any hot-fixes needed. The aim of this effort was to transition to our Identities spec as well as improve on our APIs. With this set of changes, there was a need to transition radicle-upstream to use this version of radicle-link – not an easy feat. We began to do this as Christmas closed in. As we migrated things over we noticed some issues that we fixed as they cropped up. This has culminated in a long-lived PR against radicle-upstream.
But wait, there’s more. The next branch was in radicle-link for a while before we even launched the beta. As we were testing out the beta we noticed that the networking portion of the radicle-link stack needed some love. async Rust hasn’t always been a good friend to us, and we’ve tried to figure out how to best work with it while improving the membership and gossip protocols in radicle-link. So this work was started on net/next, which we recently decided to merge into next, and ultimately merge next into our mainline branch.
This left us with a decision to make. Should we merge the PR mentioned above or get all these changes in, test them, and release them as v0.2.0. We decided for the later for a couple of reasons. We thought it would be easier to merge this all in one go instead of ending up in this Sysiphian task of intergrating new changes. The second reason is that it feels more natural to explore the latest code in its functionality (and possible bugs) rather than fixing the current beta code that we’ll be dropping soon.
You may have noticed that we’re having some trouble with our seedling node. This is due to the node running this already legacy code – ho boy does software move fast and break things!
Today we started powering through updating radicle-upstream to use the latest & greatest of net/next. It will be another PR against the PR mentioned above. We’re making good progress but can’t put an exact time on when it’ll be fully done – you know how it is 
More details about this upgrade will come out closer to the time, but until then, keep an eye out on our channels for the v0.2.0 announcement. It’s going to be a big step towards having some great features in the Radicle protocol and application.
Thank you for your patience with these hiccups 
It’s fun but hard to juggle all these balls but it’s worth it to see the excitement you, the community, bring to the table.
Stay Radicle
– Fintan 
