Hey everyone!

Welcome to weekly update 28. This week we’ll go through changes in the latest Raiden weekly testnet release and check what’s in queue for the upcoming week.

Raiden v0.5.0 - “Tanacetum”

Tanacetum is the codename for the latest weekly snapshot of Raiden’s testnet release. It contains compatibility breaking changes, so if you have any of the previous testnets releases installed, please follow the steps required to get everything working again.

Tanacetum introduces several new features and fixes for a few of the smaller bugs. A lot of changes were introduced to the WAL (write-ahead log). The WAL is responsible for keeping track of all the changes inside the Raiden client while it’s running. In the case of the Raiden client going offline (either intentional or unintentional), WAL will make sure that no information’s lost and that the Raiden client can continue operating smoothly once it’s back online.

Refactoring of the channel identifier that was explained in last week's weekly update and required work on almost all the Raiden repositories, was successfully completed. You can see that it affected 46 files in Raiden client only in this pull request containing the refactoring and it was carefully reviewed by multiple team members. This refactoring was quite significant and the biggest problem with it was that it was getting in the way of other features. It being done should make the development process easier and quicker.

The team added exact definitions of what a ‘payment’ and ‘transfer’ is referring to within the context of the Raiden Network. Definitions according to the Raiden glossary are:

• In Raiden a Payment denotes the process of sending tokens from one account to another. A payment has an initiator and a target and can be composed of multiple transfers.
• In Raiden a Transfer denotes a single hop transfer of tokens, either direct or hash time locked inside a payment channel.

In the Tanacetum release, parts of the codebase was adjusted in respect to these definitions.

The team really pushed themselves to new limits this week. Just by looking at the Github activity I am sure many of them worked overtime to complete everything in time for Tanacetum release. The number of commits, lines changed and issues solved are not always true indication of amount of work done, but this week was so crazy it even surprised Lefteris.

Development progress

A tradition has started forming where every week since Raiden has been on testnet, at the end of each week a new milestone goal is introduced. This week was no exception, so Red Eyes Testnet5 was created by the development team. Several features were already added to it and we can see that for now there are no big tasks like refactoring of the channel identifier was.

The Red Eyes milestone goal currently more or less serves as a storage for issues until they’re added to Testnet milestone goals when development team is setting targets for the next release. The list is getting thinner with each week behind us and it’s currently sitting at 13 remaining open issues. New issues are added and the existing ones are closed or moved to the other milestone each week, but each week this list is getting shorter.

Most of the open pull requests were merged in preparation for the Tanacetum release and most of those remaining are works in progress, waiting for the beginning of the following week to be addressed.

Conclusion

A crazy week in terms of the effort put into Github and the codebase by the team. The breaking compatibility changes in Tanacetum seemed to go beyond breaking the speed of sound, taking development to Mach 3. The new milestone goal for testnet takes us one step closer to mainnet. As always, thanks to all the guys at brainbot who help make this update informative to the community on the Github activity and feel free to leave questions in the comments and I’ll get back to them the best I can!

Cheers!