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Progress Report 12th January 2002

Over the past few months, most will have noticed a frustrating bug which caused the node to lock-up, and to fail to start until the datastore had been cleared or reset. This became known as the "datastore bug", and remained the primary obsticle to release of the stable 0.5 version.

Tavin Cole realised months ago that the datastore bug was symptomatic of some fundamental flaws in the implementation of the datastore, and set about a lenghtly rewrite.

In the mean-time, other developers continued to refine other aspects of the code base, making it actually quite usable despite the crippling datastore bug. Probably the most obvious such improvement is reworking the way Freenet handled other nodes in the network which were unreliable. We have also refined some other aspects of how Freenet handles communication with other nodes in the network.

Third-party developers have also been hard at work, Frost being a particularly good example.

A few weeks before Christmas Tavin unveiled the new datastore code, and in the intervening few weeks we have been working to reintegrate it into the main Freenet codebase. That process is nearing completion now, to the point that the node is working (and apparently free of any datastore bug!).

There are, however, a few remaining issues, the most visible being that the node occasionally returns random rubbish instead of data, this can be cured by re-requesting the data. Tavin is confident that he will be able to locate and fix the problem within the next few days.

We are also reorganising the code, the intention being to make life easier for both developers and users, and to bring the layout in-line with what is becomming standard practice with Java software.

Anyway, things are really starting to come together, after a couple of weeks of testing my hope is that we can release Freenet 0.5. Impatient users should be able to start downloading snapshots containing the new datastore code in the next couple of days.

- Ian.