2019 04 25 TSC Minutes

(7:00am - 8:00am PT)

via Zoom

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TSC Members

Present?

  • Arnaud Le Hors
  • Baohua Yang
  • Binh Nguyen
  • Christopher Ferris
  • Dan Middleton
  • Hart Montgomery
  • Kelly Olson
  • Mark Wagner
  • Mic Bowman
  • Nathan George
  • Silas Davis

Resources:

Announcements

  • CI/CD committee is going, ping Dave Huseby to join
  • Upgrading out certifications and looking for volunteers to help with that.
    • Upgrading Fabric certification to 1.4.1
    • Sawtooth needs to be updated as well.
  • Dave posted the project readiness rough draft.
    • there's a lot to say about project readiness and ideas for how we can measure it but a lot of it repeats what we've already captured on the wiki.
    • current rough draft focuses on what we have left to do such as formalizing the exit criteria and creating forms that allow teams to fill them out in a self-service model.
    • projects/labs don't always know the rules of the game when trying to get read to transition from one stage of project maturity to the next. we should clarify it with checklists in forms.

Items of discussion

  • Project proposals
    • Shawn (Transact):
      • Transact is a library that is intended to make the execution of smart contracts easier and pluggable.
      • It means taking a list of transactions and ending up with a list of resulting transaction receipts which are state changes for the global state.
      • It seems simple but has lots of important details.
      • The central piece of the project is the scheduler.
        • It handles the flow of transactions.
        • Marshals transactions to transaction execution VMs such as Saber and SETH.
        • Feeds transaction receipts to the global state consensus mechanism.
    • Gari:
      • It's good that we're starting to having more common components.
      • Looked at different transaction processing systems and this is very interesting.
    • Brian:
      • started talking about recategorizing the different between projects and libraries.
      • we may want to talk about more categories of hyperledger projects in a future TSC call.
      • we should reconsider the name.
    • Questions
      • Nathan: this project seems interesting because Indy doesn't currently have a sandbox for transactions processing. In terms of support for cross-project integration, are there any developers engaged in requirements gathering from other teams?
      • Shawn: currently working with Gari on the Fabric team to make sure that the interface is something that both Sawtooth and Fabric can use.
      • Mark: how much of this is code that's being lifted out of something and how much of it has been written from scratch?
      • Shawn: the design is substantially the same as what is in sawtooth currently but what is in sawtooth is in python and this is written in rust. so it is inspired by what's in sawtooth but it was a rewrite in rust and the opportunity lets us to make something that is more cross-framework friendly and a reusable library component.
      • Mic: what will be done to encourage participation from other projects? how much work do you expect for another platform to do to adopt it and who will do the work and who maintains it?
      • Shawn: we've learned a lot with Sawtooth and Grid to get more community participation and we expect to apply those lessons to Transact. Using RFCs works as a good way to communicate plans and to build consensus around the plans. The integrations code would be owned by the projects that use the library component.
      • Hart: do you have any API documentation?
      • Shawn: it is not up, but it is currently in the transact repo itself and can be generated using rustdoc. The api documentation is comments in the code itself.
      • Dan: how do you generate them?
      • Shawn: cargo doc
      • Hart: for ursa people have found it useful to have a docs repo for the documentation instead of generating from the source.
      • Jonathan: maybe we should develop transact to be more mature and then set some joint milestones for projects to adopt transact sometime down the line.
      • Binh: does transact take into account multi-stage execution of smart contracts (e.g. creating a read-write set, and then validation)?
      • Shawn: the second diagram in the doc shows that the distributed ledger is in charge of how to apply the state changes. Transact supports decoupling the receipts from the state change commitment.
      • Baohua: the proposal should be improved with API documentation and how they intend to do FFI.
      • Gari: the purpose of transact isn't to define the API's but to be more about the I/O protocol definitions.
      • Shawn: if we need to do wrappers, it should be fairly straight forward and maintained inside of the project.
      • Mark: in general we need to be careful when we start doing libraries in different languages that we don't get ourselves into dependency hell.
  • Nathan (Aries)
    • In digital identity the distributed ledger stores the verifiable data oracle.
    • The portion for the identity owners to interact based on referencing the ledger for verifiable claims has become larger and larger and extends beyond Indy. The time has come to split it off.
    • The protocol for sharing identity information is different than the protocols for making a ledger work.
    • Inside of Indy there is a resolver layer for anchoring data to the blockchain. But more interestingly, there is a credential exchange protocol that is separate from the ledger protocols.
    • Indy ↔ Aries ↔ Ursa. the interaction layers can be abstracted so that other blockchains such as fabric or sawtooth can be supported.
    • Questions:
      • Dan: can you comment on how this project helps attract contributors from the broader identity community that isn't directly involved with Hyperledger? Also can you comment on how Ursa affects the ability to attract them?
      • Nathan: we're seeing a lot of excitement around Ursa from the identity community because Ursa gives us a place to try out a lot of the new crypto features for ZKP and other verifiable claim feature. Separating Aries from Indy encourages the broader community to get involved since it is divorced from the blockchain community.
      • Nathan: going to be at IIW and we want to socialize it better and invite the broader decentralized identity community to get more involved.
      • Brian: thanks for following the format for project proposals and thank you for finding a good name. I'm excited about this and would love to see it get started.
      • Vipin: I'm a sponsor on the Aries project and impressed with the presentation that Nathan gave to the identity working group. There is a longer recording on the identity working group page. Aries is taking us towards adoption.

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