Hey everyone!

Welcome to Weekly Update 29. Before we start going through the latest Raiden weekly Testnet release, I would like to invite everyone who have opportunity to join Raiden at Copenhagen Ethereum Meetup on the 28th of August. It will be a one day event where Danes working in Ethereum space will present their projects. Raiden will be represented by Jacob S. Czepluch, a great speaker and one of the devs that’s been with Raiden for more than two years.

Raiden v0.5.1 - “Ándale”

Ándale is the codename for the latest Raiden weekly Testnet release. It’s a patch release of last week’s Tanacetum which is indicative that backward compatibility wasn’t broken with it. However, it contains valuable features and bug fixes so upgrading your Raiden version to Ándale is strongly encouraged.

After Tanacetum release, which brought many changes to the codebase, the development team decided that for Ándale they’ll focus more on internal structure of the code and reliability of the Raiden Network client. That showed itself as a good decision because along with it they were able to fix some small problems the Raiden client had with restarting during the Tanacetum release.

The biggest feature introduced with Ándale is the handling of number of pending transfers inside a node. Before the implementation of this feature it was possible for node to have too much pending transfers and it wouldn’t be able to unlock them because that would require too much gas. Currently, the maximum number of pending transfers a node can handle at the same time is 160. The remaining features improved logging and the format of events.

Apart from bug fixes and features, work on internal structure of the code sets ground for future weeks. Planning and work on the next milestone goal has already started, but more about that in next chapter.

Development progress

In parallel with wrapping up everything for the Ándale release the development team created new milestone goal titled “Red Eyes Testnet 6”. Looking at the issues already added to it we can see they decided to skip all the breaking changes for the Ándale release and decided to include them next week. Pull requests for several of those issues are already waiting for the review. Tracking of the issues that break backward compatibility was made significantly easier since team added a special tag for tracking those issues on Github.

A fix for automatic deployment is the last remaining open issue in the Red Eyes Testnet5 milestone goal. The problem with automatic deploy has been giving the development team a headache for several weeks now, but it seems from Github discussion that they’ve finally found the cure. I believe they’ll fix it without too much trouble at the start of the upcoming week.

The main milestone goal for the Red Eyes release contains issues that have pull request ready for review while some are waiting to be worked on. We can expect that there’ll be some shuffling of issues between milestone goals and possibly addition of new ones during the planning session at the start of upcoming week.

Conclusion

Testing of the protocol continues as the team addresses the issues involved with it one after another. The next release will contain the recently merged breaking changes as well as a number of new features and bug fixes. As usual thanks to all the contributors of brainbot who help make this GIT update series as goods as it can be. Also I’ll respond to any comments about the post (or anything Raiden related) the best I can in the comments! See the update here next week.

Cheers!