Week 18: W/E 25th October 2019
Each week, this is where we’ll share a high-level summary of key achievements and what’s been going on in the program. Remember, for the very latest technical updates you can follow all the commits and pull requests in the community GitHub.
If you are not already part of the conversation, you’ll find a hive of activity over at the stake pool Best Practice Telegram. With almost 3,000 members and loads of engaged users, this is a great resource for anyone interested in contributing to the program. Continued thanks to everyone from the community, especially our amazing Ambassadors. Your contributions have been central to the pace of development we’ve been able to achieve and we want this to continue.
What’s Up
With the Networked phase of the Shelley testnet continuing fast, and as we head towards the Incentivized phase, we’re now adjusting our approach to the way we release and test software builds.
We’ll soon be making some more fundamental improvements to the code base that from time to time will require users to reset to reconfigure their nodes, effectively serving as a full system reset for the network. This is a standard procedure in software testing and we appreciate that while more advanced users will be fine with this, not every user will be able or want to do this every time.
So we’re now classifying our releases into two types:
- Beta releases: these are builds which we recommended the average user downloads and configures. These builds are about maintaining the continuity of the network. While not always fully stable, these builds will contain code that has been more thoroughly tested.
- ‘Nightly’ releases: these are builds which will often contain more significant changes but due to earlier stage code, will be fundamentally more unstable. These builds are also likely to iterate rapidly - sometimes even with a new version daily (hence the name ‘nightly’). These candidates will be named (e.g. 0.7.0-rc or 0.7.0-rc2 etc.) to differentiate them from our beta releases. The purpose of these is to push out more advanced functionality for community testing by more advanced users. As a result, these builds may be incompatible with the previous beta release and require a full network reset and new configuration settings to work properly. You’ll find more information on trusted peers and the latest genesis hash over on the Testnets site.
By taking this parallel approach, we hope to achieve the best of both worlds; a relatively stable network of nodes, populated by a large volume of users, all testing and giving their valuable feedback. But also, the opportunity for the community to help us move faster (and if necessary, break things) as we continue to build out a robust, feature-rich network.
Support
New Issues - 16
Closed Issues - 15
Issue Backlog - 16
For both flavors of releases described above, the IOHK Support Portal is always the best place for you to file issues. If you have development experience, can get detailed logs, know how to look at a backtrace and are comfortable with reading the Rust code and testing on master to reproduce and test fixes, we don’t want to discourage you from working directly with the developers filing issues on the jormungandr GitHub repo. We’re an open-source community and welcome any and all contributions!
Documentation & Content
The testnet website was updated to include an explanation of the beta and nightly releases and to outline the respective objectives of each. We also included a new section for the associated trusted peer details, genesis block hash information, and REST API command to use for receiving funds when using the nightly release testnet.
We also made some navigation improvements to link between relevant content, and this is an area that we plan to further improve over the coming weeks to help you find what you need easier and quicker than before.
Community Content
Please note, these community resources are shared in good faith for you to use at your own discretion. You’ll always find ‘official’ documentation and instructions within IOHK & Cardano channels.
- Community Member Roberto Morano got his Jormungandr node running on his Android phone.
- Cardano Ambassador Rick’s overview showing global connections to his Jorgurmandr node continues to grow. Currently it shows 106 connected nodes.
- Cardano Community Telegram user ‘M M’ has made a website Cardano.pub, which shows a worldwide map of every connected node.
That’s it for now!
Thanks
The Stakepool Testing team