Hey everyone!

I hope you found a nice cool place and that you’re ready for a fresh weekly update on Raiden’s progress. With another very interesting week behind us we will check what is new and what we can expect in the upcoming weeks.

Raiden v0.4.2 - “Havona”

After last week’s 0.4.1 release, under code name Ceteris Paribus (you can read all about it in last week's post), the development team stuck to their plan of making releases every 1-2 weeks and this Thursday we were introduced to Havona. Havona is the newest Ropsten testnet release and since its version number is 0.4.2 it means it doesn’t have breaking changes inside.

Features introduced with Havona should make debugging and bug reporting much easier. With Havona release it’s possible to save to a file all the important changes that happen inside Raiden whilst it’s running. If something unexpected happens while Raiden is running it’ll be saved to that same file alongside everything that leads to that unexpected behaviour. Developers can then use and share information saved to that file to accurately determine what caused that unexpected behaviour. If outside developers find a bug in Raiden, they can attach that file to their bug report to help Raiden developers find and fix the bug.

The Havona release contains several bug fixes as well. Most of the bug fixes are focused on better handling and improved reporting of edge case scenarios. For example, if a user tries to deposit negative amount of tokens, he will get a proper error message saying that it is not possible to do so.

All in all, Havona release doesn’t contain any groundbreaking changes to the code base. Most of the changes were polishing of already existing features. Nevertheless, it is a step closer to a successful, bug free Red Eyes mainnet release.

Development progress

In parallel to reaching Red Eyes Testnet3 and releasing Havona, the team created a new milestone goal named Red Eyes Testnet 4 (this time there is space between “Testnet” and number :)). Several open issues were already added to it and it seems that the next release will introduce some breaking changes to the codebase.

The most significant planned task for the Testnet 4 milestone is refactoring of how channels are identified inside the code. In the current implementation a channel between two participants is identified with the help of a function that basically uses addresses of both parties to calculate a unique hash. The team decided that the current approach is giving them too much trouble, so they proposed a solution to just use a simple number to identify a channel. If you’re more interested in this topic, you can find a complete discussion about it here. Good news is that the work on this task was already started and the smart contracts seem ready for this change.

Alongside refactoring of channel identifier, the team decided to add several other, smaller tasks to Red Eyes Testnet 4 milestone goal. The other tasks are targeting various alternative parts of code base that need some polishing and documentation the development team wants to release with Red Eyes mainnet release. You can find the complete list here.

Conclusion

To finish off this update, we had another successful and progressive week of testing. The next milestone will be another snapshot of the Testnet release which will hopefully see some of the benefits of the debugging improvements from Havona. As always, a shout out to the helping hands at brainbot with the update and I invite you to ask any questions you might have in the comments!

Cheers!