Crown development meeting minutes 17/02/2020
Just the facts, ma’am
Present: artem, crowncoin-knight, pjcltd, walkjivefly
There was no development progress meeting last week. Artem is too busy during the day now so we have moved the meeting to Monday evenings.
Does the Emerald release absolutely have to be a hard fork release? If so, how will it be activated?
Artem thinks we should upgrade the protocol version for the new release and cut off old version nodes/wallets after a couple of weeks. Given the recent problems with testnet instability walkjivefly agreed. Theoretically Jade clients should ignore NFT transactions and be able to mint blocks containing them, but the presence of non v0.13.9.3 nodes on testnet is suspected to have contributed to its instability.
A very provisional timetable for the Emerald release is mainnet release around 2 March, protocol enforcing from two weeks later. This will mean the whole network is NFT capable two or three weeks before Coinfest UK (3–5 April) and we will be able to demonstrate NFT applications at the event. This is subject to
* Artem having time to review and fix the latest NFT protocol validation bugs and testnet remaining stable after he releases a new build to test a protocol version change and enforcing.
* No insurmountable obstacles from our exchange partners if presented with Emerald being a hard fork release.
The state of testing completeness
As reported previously there has been very little community participation in NFT framework testing. There have been some practical difficulties for anyone who would like to participate. We had to rewind the chain on 9/10 February to the 16 January snapshot to resolve some incompatibilities introduced by the enhancement requests in v0.13.9.3.
walkjivefly conducted some basic framework command validation last week and encountered a number of problems for which he opened new issues. These were intentional attempts to break things, not expected to occur under “normal” circumstances. Other testing that we’re aware of has amounted to little more than creating some protocols and tokens. There hasn’t been any application-level testing in the public testnet. If anyone has been conducting sandbox testing please let us know.
At the end of last week testnet fractured into at least three chains and proved difficult and time-consuming (ie: all weekend) to restore.
Review of open testnet issues. How/when will the remaining open issues be addressed? Which ones MUST be fixed before release, which ones can be deferred?
Artem will review the protocol and token validation issues. These are fundamental things which MUST be addressed. Testnet stability/locking issues will be monitored after Artem pushes a protocol version bump. To help with this pjcltd will add a bunch of additional testnet nodes on the servers he manages. In this way we should be able to extend testnet from around a dozen nodes to between about 30 and 40.
Some issues will be deferred until after the Emerald release. At that point we will probably completely re-initialise testnet and then see which are still extant.
Probability of getting the bitcore API completed in time for inclusion in the release?
Artem doesn’t have the bandwidth to do this, and definitely not before our target release date. He estimates there may be a month of full time work required. He has discussed this with defunctec and crowncoin-knight who will see if they can find an external developer to complete it. The chances of getting it done in time for the Chronovault use-case to be ready before Coinfest are slim but not entirely impossible.
State of readiness for the marketing campaign?
crowncoin-knight reported the marketing team have secured the funding required for the marketing plan. Materials are being prepared and should be ready for a March campaign launch, in parallel with the Emerald code release.
