[freenet-support] Unbundling Frost

[Matthew Toseland]

Ian has stated that Frost is a separate project, and we should not wait for a 
usable FMS. (Background: Frost has been severely DoS'ed recently due to being 
based on KSK queues, and FMS is the answer). Right now we are not actually 
being DoS'ed, but yesterday we were; the spammer occasionally takes a day 
off, but IMHO he's likely to stop spamming now until shortly before we ship 
0.7.0, and then make Frost unusable again.

1) We could just not ship Frost, in order to meet Ian's totally arbitrary 
deadline (not that totally arbitrary deadlines aren't of some value!). 
However IMHO we will have *dramatically* less user retention if we don't have 
a usable chat client - at least on the order of 50%. This is because Freenet 
is a community, and no community can function without chat.

2) Or we could ship Frost even though we know it will probably be DoS'ed 
again, and may be being actively DoS'ed at the point that we ship it. In 
which case IMHO we should advise users about this fact in our announcement 
for 0.7.0. Maybe some good publicity will come from it - it could hardly be 
any worse than us shipping an application which is utterly useless, and each 
user having to figure that out themselves! Telling users will put them 
off ... but not telling users will also put them off.

3) Or we could make a working chat system of some kind a release blocker, and 
act accordingly: review third party code and help in porting FMS to java if 
that is necessary. At the moment FMS is written in C (and therefore not 
bundle-able), and uses a combination of HTTP and NNTP interfaces (and 
therefore is not user friendly). IMHO the critical path would be to translate 
it to java, implement it as a plugin, implement a separate plugin with a web 
interface based on that of Worst, bundle those, and let the Frost devs port 
Frost to use the plugin. Some of this has already been started, but I haven't 
seen much progress recently on the FMS board (which oddly is the only board 
never to have been DoS'ed).

Important note: We are not quite ready to ship Freenet yet; there is a good 
deal more debugging needs to be done. IMHO we will be easily ready to ship a 
release candidate in March, although maybe not 0.7.0 (Ian's deadline is 
March).

Freenet 0.7.0 is likely to be slashdotted; it may not get any wider coverage, 
since the world has moved on, but we will see. Last time, over two years ago, 
0.5.0 got mentioned on ZD Business Week as well as slashdot. We need to make 
the best possible use of this opportunity - provided that it doesn't delay 
matters indefinitely.

Opinions on which of the above options is most useful?
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