Status Update

Weekly Development Report

DAEDALUS

Wallet

This week the team implemented improvements in the NTP time check handling logic. These improvements prevent false positive NTP check results, which would wrongly trigger the display of the NTP error screen during Daedalus startup and after losing and restoring internet connection.

A significant feature has been finished this week: Daedalus now keeps track of available disk space and if there is not enough free disk space for normal operation, Daedalus shuts down Cardano node and displays an error screen with information about the problem and instructions about how to resolve it. This feature prevents potential data corruption in a situation where a user runs out of available disk space while Daedalus is running.

The team is working on performance improvements for the "Receive" and "Transactions" screens, since having a large number of wallet addresses and transactions is currently causing rendering delays on these screens.

In the scope of regular maintenance, the team added a fix for text rendering issues of application menu items on Ubuntu 18.10.

The design team finished initial user interface designs for Daedalus features which are coming with Shelley release. These designs were presented at an internal Berlin workshop to other teams working on delegation and ledger formal specifications.

App Platform

The team attended an internal workshop in Berlin where they discussed and planned the long-term and short-term roadmap of the Daedalus application platform project.

NETWORKING

No updates this week.

DEVOPS

This week the dominant theme in DevOps activity was core build tooling.

The nix-tools project is maturing, with hackage.nix, stackage.nix, and haskell.nix being spun off as separate projects for the benefit of the community, while also allowing for greater separation of concerns. Some effort was spent pinning down a GHC bug in ghc-pkg, which was filed as upstream GHC Trac issue #16417.

We continued test automation improvements, both to cover the Windows wallet with acceptance tests, and also to update the system testing infrastructure, which received a lot of attention.

Enrollment of Cardano rewrite repositories continued, with cardano-wallet and cardano-shell in the process of being ported to nix-tools, ouroboros-network being fully ported, and Windows cross-compilation still being worked on.

Regarding Daedalus, the team participated in some UI discussions, did a feasibility study for making the update download parallel to syncing, and fixed a Linux wallet update issue.

The Goguen side of affairs received some routine deployments and infrastructure fixes. The 2.0.1 release had our close attention, as usual with releases, and we also did some exchange support.

CARDANO DECENTRALIZATION

Last week, IOHK held an internal workshop in Berlin to make sure everyone is aligned on their work for Shelley - and it was a great success!

The team working on the formal specification for the ledger rules (including delegation) presented their work in great detail, and received a lot of valuable feedback from their colleagues. Based on this presentation, attendees discussed the major design decisions, and made sure they are in line with the business requirements. Having people from the specification and implementation teams together for a whole week was a great opportunity to lay the groundwork and make sure everyone is on the same page.

To support further development, a process was designed to ensure that low-level implementation decisions are properly communicated between the Haskell and Rust teams, so that they will end up with compatible implementations.

Finally, the attendees were able to answer a number of remaining open questions which required input from researchers, developers, DevOps, and the formal methods team, such as details of the transition plan from Byron to Shelley, and the precise timing of when nodes need to calculate rewards for a given epoch.

For more information about the Berlin meetup, see IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson's most recent AMA.

GOGUEN

No updates this week.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

IOHK is currently looking for talented people to work with us as a Rust Software Engineer, Haskell Trainer as well as several others. Please see the IOHK Careers page for more details.