2019-11-04 Indy Contributors Call

Owned by Richard Esplin
Last updated: Nov 05, 2019
4 min read

Summary

  • Project updates
  • Problems with the Indy IOS wrapper.
  • The future of Plenum

Timezone: Europe afternoon and US morning

We intend to record this call.

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Introductions

Attendees

  • Name (Employer) <email>
  • Richard Esplin (Evernym) <richard.esplin@evernym.com>
  • Ken Ebert (Sovrin Foundation) <ken@sovrin.org>
  • Matt Raffel (Kiva) <mattr@kiva.org>
  • Stephen Curran (Cloud Compass/BC Gov) <swcurran@cloudcompass.ca>

Related Calls and Announcements

Release Status and Work Updates

  • Indy Node
  • Indy SDK
    • October: 1.12.1
      • Might skip the release, push to November
    • November (1.12.1 or 1.13.0)
    • Future
      • GitLab migration alongside Jenkins (Foundation)?
      • Anoncreds 2.0 (Sovrin Foundation)
      • Warnings from rust cargo clippy (Mike and Axel), epic: IS-1410
  • Indy Catalyst
    • Production deployment testing: volume loads.
      • Trying to identify performance bottlenecks. Currently think it's calls to the database.
      • Performance problems is preventing going to production.
    • Not yet migrated to Hyperledger. Needs more documentation.
  • Documentation improvements: Michael B and Stephen C
    • Need to review and prune out-of-date documentation (Alice / Faber treatment of pairwise DIDs is a key pain point)
    • Cloud Compass is building the Linux Foundation EdX courses for Indy and Aries
      • Overview launch date: November 21st
      • More content will follow
  • New design for revocation / Anoncreds 2.0 (Mike)
    • Would be useful to have a comparison in performance between Anoncreds 1.0 and Anoncreds 2.0
    • Need a plan for changes to Indy Node

Main Business

  • Problems with the iOS wrapper
    • Lohan: We are using CocoaPods to manage our dependencies within our iOS project. We are experiencing some issues with the pod "libindy-objc". 
    • Others with the same issue: https://forum.sovrin.org/t/ios-indy-sdk-image-not-found/1306
    • XCode 9 (what is currently supported by Indy SDK) is deprecated will soon be End-of-Life. Only supported in OSX before Sierra.
    • Previous experience with upgrading XCode: IS-1261
  • Timeline for deprecating Indy wrappers in favor of Aries contributions
    • Focus is on the Aries SDK, no longer on the Indy SDK
    • Moving too fast to deprecate will scare people trying to get started today, because there are no mature alternatives in Aries today.
      • Especially with the mobile wrappers.
        • .NET and Xamarin is used by Open Source Mobile Agent (OSMA), which works today.
        • Team at DIDx is struggling with React Native. Wants to open source a React Native app platform.
        • WebAssembly would be the most performant approach.
      • BC.gov is working on a plan for building on existing Aries today.
  • Evaluating Plenum
    • Pros versus other ledgers
    • Improvements we would like to make
    • Recent performance testing (increased batch size and write latency)
    • Top level Hyperledger Project?
  • Problems with RBFT replicas:
    • Indy Node Epics
      • INDY-2251: Problems with RBFT Replicas
      • INDY-2250: Removing replicas (move from RBFT to Aardvark)

Future Calls

  • Define the pull request review process for Indy Plenum/Node
    • Should define the process, including how we handle exceptions (emergency fixes shouldn't be blocked, but would require notification)
    • What is important in a good review?
    • Proposed Process (by Evernym team):
      • All Pull Requests can be reviewed by non-Evernym team members
      • Evernym team members will also do internal review in addition to external one
      • All interested parties are notified when a PR is sent
      • If a person wants to do an external review, he or she puts a comment or tag. This needs to be done in X hours.
      • Once a reviewer put a "want-to-review" tag, he or she need to finish review in Y hours
      • If no one wants to review a PR in X hours, or review is not finished in Y hours, we can do our internal review and merge the PR
      • An external review can be done against closed PRs as well, and Evernym team will process all findings ASAP
      • We may merge a PR with internal review only in case of urgency (critical fixes, release preparation etc.)
    • Items to be defined with the Community:
      1. A timeframe for external review (X):
        - X=12 hours, Y=2 days?
      2. What projects it should affect?
        - Plenum and Node?
        - Only Node?
        - We are not proposing SDK as it will be split to Aries in any case
      3. Who is going to commit to participate in this process?
  • Migration of Indy-SDK to Aries-Core
  • Requirements question: IS-1099, should we allow duplicate credentials from the same issuer?
  • Non-secrets in the Indy Wallet
    • Cam is working on pluggable crypto. They wallet shouldn't decide what encryption you should be using.
    • Use cases where we would want to move keys between wallets
      • Moving the link secret / credential data from one device to another (synchronized storage).
      • Debug use cases
      • Richard's hit other uses cases that were better solved with DID Doc,  pre-signing, signing API.
    • Work-around with the web-crypto API

Action items

  • HIPE #138, Issue #144 (Ken and Brent)
    • Create a PR for changing status to ACCEPTED
    • Check for an Aries RFC
  • PR to RFC #0019 to compare pack/upack to msgpack (Sergey)
  • Richard and Sergey will close old pull requests with a descriptive comment.
  • Mike wants to review the 61 cases of "unsafe" libindy calls and figure out if they are justified.

Call Recording