Filecoin tools progress update: 27 January

Summary

In addition to building the technology, this sprint was the kick-off to our communications and developer outreach. We made progress connecting with other developers and projects, hoping to make use of our tools. We released our announcement blog post to spread the word.  We completed the first components of a public Filecoin Reputation Index. We temporarily side-lined our Repair Module development until later in our roadmap.

Background Links 📘

• Project blog post.
• Concepts and development areas.
• Previous progress summary.

Next Steps🍿

• Get up to go-fil-markets since will be merged this week or next in Lotus: impacts deals, retrieval, encodings (CIDs). May fire contributions in Lotus regarding new APIs to get new inner features
• Give a reasonable shot to using a sectorbuilder mock on local devnet.
• Plan and build public-facing APIs for using the Reputation Indices.
• Begin designing the FAST API (Filecoin + IPFS/HTTP Gateway & Caching). Requires more understanding about encoding in Filecoin to know if translation between storage is necessary (mostly re. IPFS).
• Polish Textile's internal Grafana metrics dashboard for the Filecoin network, review release of publish dashboard .
• Enhancements to the Lotus archive backup tool. Add logic for automated local unpinning, review upgrade to new Lotus export format.

Sprint Progress Details

Focus Areas 📐

• First components of the Reputation Index are running. We’ll wrap these into useful endpoints for other projects in the next sprint. Examples: slashing, miners, asks.
• We completed the first version of the developer CLI for the deal module.
• We shared the lotus archive and recovery feed.

Discussion & Planning Changes 🤔

• We built a local devnet to evaluate using it for e2e tests. Not really feasible until some mocks can be built to avoid (un)sealing and most proofs. Verified in discussion in Filecoin Slack discussion.
• We de-prioritized deal Repair Module for the time-being. The module seemed highly speculative before we more completely understand and feel the flow of storage/retrieval. We'll attack this one again in two weeks.

Closed 💥

• Deals and Wallet CLI (fil-tools pull request).
• reputation: index info, reputation module, metrics, and more fixes (fil-tools pull request).
• Auto-reconnect in JsonRPC client (lotus pull request), which was a prioritized feature for testnet, which also was needed by us to have reliable services that use Lotus in https://github.com/textileio/fil-tools/pull/68
• Chain notify freeze bug fix (lotus pull request).
• A new api to calculate arbitrary forks revert and applys (lotus pull request), which was the base for us taking care of chain reorganizations/forking in our indexes in https://github.com/textileio/fil-tools/pull/62

New Tickets 👀

• We evaluated a new feature for import/export of data. Ongoing discussion may extend the feature based on our experience and opinion (https://github.com/textileio/fil-tools/issues/63).
• https://github.com/filecoin-project/lotus/issues/1099 opened and already fixed.

Contact

• Feel free to join the Textile Slack or join our room on the Filecoin Slack.
• If you would like to discuss our work and how it may fit into your own projects, please reach out through email or setup a quick call here.