Testnet: necessary improvements

[anonimal]

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• I have read and understood the contributor guide in kovri-docs.
• I have checked that the issue I am reporting can be replicated or that the feature I am suggesting is not present.
• I have checked opened or recently closed pull requests for existing solutions/implementations to my issue/suggestion.

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More to come after I finish discussing in #kovri-dev.

[anonimal]

2018-06-05  @anonimal 1. I'm at a crossroads here.
2018-06-05  @anonimal 2. We need to really improve our testnet. Coming back to it, I could barely set it up let alone usefully use it.
2018-06-05  @anonimal 3. The script is becoming too complex and needs to be implemented differently - and not as a script.
2018-06-05  @anonimal 4. I first thought doing some zenity work. The results would be nice in terms of a quick hack to make the setup and execution easier.
2018-06-05  @anonimal 5. Upon further work though, it's not so quick and it's ultimately a hack upon the hack and is only making the script more bloated and difficult to use.
2018-06-05  @anonimal 6. So, the crossroads:
2018-06-05  @anonimal 7. The testnet really should've been in the top 10 prioirties since the beginning but it wasn't because of all the other critical fixes needed.
2018-06-05  @anonimal 8. A) continue to patch a hacky, difficult to setup/use testnet that no one will want to play with and has little reward but *may* be enough to barely get by patching core code
2018-06-05  @anonimal 9. B) re-implement the exsting script/concepts into Qt. Lots of more work but with actual reward - and people will actually want to use it. Drawback: time
2018-06-05  @anonimal 10. I wish we could something simple like monero's testnet, simply switch on options, but it's a completely different beast of network and I don't think we can do something like that.
2018-06-05  @anonimal 11. Implementing a testnet option into kovri-util also crossed my mind, but there are far too many shell calls to justify swapping a cli option with another cli option.
2018-06-05  @anonimal Numbered 1 through 11 in case things were out of order / missing
2018-06-05  @anonimal Sidenote, and essentially the options are becoming too large to not have a config file too, so that will also be added.
2018-06-05  @anonimal There's also a python option, but that's another swapping of cli with cli.
2018-06-05  @anonimal And the Qt interface would not only be neat for testing hooks, but could also be easily used with monero gui.
2018-06-05  @anonimal What I like about zenity is how extremely easy it is to read device files.
2018-06-05  @anonimal So, it reads the log pipe and displays with almost no effort on the developers part.
2018-06-05  @anonimal But the functionality kind of ends there; there's no bigger concept available to work with.

The consensus has been to move forward with Qt. @coneiric will be collaborating.

I'd like to keep an open discussion for python and python bottle though, and something that could either work with or adequately replace grafana.

[coneiric]

Currently working on RI creation API that we talked about in IRC, logging and NetDb refactors. Hopefully, work in these areas will help with the testnet.

[coneiric]

Put together some notes for the testnet API design: testnet_api_notes.md.

More-or-less summarizes what is currently implemented in the testnet bash scripts, and what would need to be implemented to move that functionality into kovri-util & Qt GUI components.

Let me know if that's helpful, or some other medium would be better.

[anonimal]

If you want to PR something to kovri-docs, that would be great.

[coneiric]

If you want to PR something to kovri-docs, that would be great.

I PRed a couple documents to the kovri-docs repo. Mainly just wanted to get it PRed to not forget about it.

Just noticed that you removed this from the 0.1.0-alpha milestone, so won't be focusing much more on this until after the release.

[anonimal]

NOTICE: THIS ISSUE HAS BEEN MOVED TO GitLab. Please continue the discussion there. See #1013 for details.